I have a while function that generates two lists of numbers and at the end I plot them using matplotlib.pyplot.
I'm doing
while True:
#....
plt.plot(list1)
plt.plot(list2)
plt.show()
But in order to see the progression I have to close the plot window. Is there a way to refresh it with the new data every x seconds?
The most robust way to do what you want is to use matplotlib.animation. Here's an example of animating two lines, one representing sine and one representing cosine.
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation as animation
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
sin_l, = ax.plot(np.sin(0))
cos_l, = ax.plot(np.cos(0))
ax.set_ylim(-1, 1)
ax.set_xlim(0, 5)
dx = 0.1
def update(i):
# i is a counter for each frame.
# We'll increment x by dx each frame.
x = np.arange(0, i) * dx
sin_l.set_data(x, np.sin(x))
cos_l.set_data(x, np.cos(x))
return sin_l, cos_l
ani = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, update, frames=51, interval=50)
plt.show()
For your particular example, you would get rid of the while True and put the logic inside that while loop in the update function. Then, you just have to make sure to do set_data instead of making a whole new plt.plot call.
More details can be found in this nice blog post, the animation API, or the animation examples.
I think what you're looking for is the "animation" feature.
Here is an example
This example is a second one.
