Remove line through legend marker with .plot

Question

I have a matplotlib plot generated with the following code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as pyplot

Fig, ax = pyplot.subplots()
for i, (mark, color) in enumerate(zip(
    ['s', 'o', 'D', 'v'], ['r', 'g', 'b', 'purple'])):
    ax.plot(i+1, i+1, color=color,
            marker=mark,
            markerfacecolor='None',
            markeredgecolor=color,
            label=i)

ax.set_xlim(0,5)
ax.set_ylim(0,5)
ax.legend()

with this as the generated figure:
matplotlib generated figure

I don’t like the lines through the markers in the legend. How can I get rid of them?

Asked By: jlconlin

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Source

Answer 1

You should use a scatterplot here

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for i, (mark, color) in enumerate(zip(
    ['s', 'o', 'D', 'v'], ['r', 'g', 'b', 'purple'])):
    ax.scatter(i+1, i+1, color=color,
            marker=mark,
            facecolors='none',
            label=i)

ax.set_xlim(0, 5)
ax.set_ylim(0, 5)
ax.legend(scatterpoints=1)

plt.show()

Answered By: M4rtini

Answer 2

You can set the rcparams for the plots:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.rcParams['legend.handlelength'] = 0
matplotlib.rcParams['legend.numpoints'] = 1

enter image description here

All the legend.* parameters are available as keywords if you don’t want the setting to apply globally for all plots. See matplotlib.pyplot.legend documentation and this related question:

legend setting (numpoints and scatterpoints) in matplotlib does not work

Answered By: Hooked

Answer 3

You can specify linestyle='None' or linestyle='' as a keyword argument in the plot command. Also, ls= can replace linestyle=.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for i, (mark, color) in enumerate(zip(
    ['s', 'o', 'D', 'v'], ['r', 'g', 'b', 'purple'])):
    ax.plot(i+1, i+1, color=color,
            marker=mark,
            markerfacecolor='None',
            markeredgecolor=color,
            linestyle='None',
            label=i)

ax.set_xlim(0, 5)
ax.set_ylim(0, 5)
ax.legend(numpoints=1)
plt.show()

Since you’re only plotting single points, you can’t see the line attribute except for in the legend.

Answered By: tom10

Answer 4

To simply remove the lines once the data has been plotted:

handles, labels = ax.get_legend_handles_labels()
for h in handles: h.set_linestyle("")
ax.legend(handles, labels)

Answered By: blalterman

Remove line through legend marker with .plot

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