[Tutor] plotting several datasets and calling data from afar

[Evert Rol]

  Hi Elaina,


> Hi everyone,
>    I am trying to set up a code to do some plotting and before I get too far I wanted to ask some structure questions.  Basically I want to tell python to read 2 datasets, plot them on the same scale on the same x-y axis , read a third dataset and match the name from the first dataset, then label certain values from the third... complicating matters is that all these data are part of much, much larger sets in seperate files, the paths look like:
> pathway1/namered.dat
> pathway2/nameblue.dat
> matchingfile.txt
> 
> so I do fopen on the matchingfile, read it with asciitable, and then I have a column in that file called 'name' and a column called 'M', I sort the file, return a subset that is interesting, and get name1, name2, etc for every subset.  I want to make a plot that looks like:
> 
> plot pathway1/namered.dat and pathway2/nameblue.dat with label 'M' for every value in the subset name1, each row[i] I need to assign to a seperate window so that I get a multiplot with a shared x-axis, and stacking my plots up the y-axis.  I do have multiplot working and I know how to plot 'M' for each subset.
> 
> The conceptual trouble has come in, how do I match 'name' variable of my subset 'name1' with the plot I want to do for pathway1/namered.dat and pathway2/nameblue.dat... the key feature that is the same is the 'name' variable, but in one instance I have to match the 'name'+'red.dat' and in the other the 'name'+'blue.dat'

It's not 100% clear to me what you precisely want to do, but here are a few possibilites:

- use a dictionary. Assign each dataset to a dictionary with the name as the key (or the name + color). Eg, dataset['name1red'], dataset['name1blue'], dataset['name2red'] etc. Each value in this dictionary is a dataset read by asciitable. 
  the (big) disadvantage is that you would read every single *.dat file beforehand
- simply fopen the files with the filename deduced from the name. So, in a loop, that would be something like 
   for name in subset_names:
      with fopen(name + 'red.dat') as datafile:
          # read data and plot
      with fopen(name + 'blue.dat') as datafile:
          # read data and plot

But perhaps I misunderstand your problem. I can't really tell if the problem is in opening the selected data files, or plotting them, or creating the labels for the plot.
This may actually be where some code comes in handy. Provided the plotting isn't the problem, you could make a very simple Python script that shows the concept and how you attempt to solve it. The simpler the script, the better probably the implementation, so even make such a simple script is incredibly useful. (Any example data sets of, say, just 2 lines each can also help with that.)
From that, the problem may become clearer and we can help you improving the script.

Of course, someone else may actually understand the problem properly and has a better suggestion.

Cheers,

  Evert

(yes, small world ;-)


> Any ideas would be appreciated, thanks!
> ~Elaina Hyde
> 
> -- 
> PhD Candidate
> Department of Physics and Astronomy
> Faculty of Science
> Macquarie University
> North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia
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