Fill between two vertical lines in matplotlib [duplicate]
I went through the examples in the matplotlib
documentation, but it wasn't clear to me how I can make a plot that fills the area between two specific vertical lines.
For example, say I want to create a plot between x=0.2
and x=4
(for the full y
range of the plot). Should I use fill_between
, fill
or fill_betweenx
?
Can I use the where
condition for this?
It sounds like you want axvspan
, rather than one of the fill between functions. The differences is that axvspan
(and axhspan
) will fill up the entire y (or x) extent of the plot regardless of how you zoom.
For example, let's use axvspan
to highlight the x-region between 8 and 14:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(range(20))
ax.axvspan(8, 14, alpha=0.5, color='red')
plt.show()
You could use fill_betweenx
to do this, but the extents (both x and y) of the rectangle would be in data coordinates. With axvspan
, the y-extents of the rectangle default to 0 and 1 and are in axes coordinates (in other words, percentages of the height of the plot).
To illustrate this, let's make the rectangle extend from 10% to 90% of the height (instead of taking up the full extent). Try zooming or panning, and notice that the y-extents say fixed in display space, while the x-extents move with the zoom/pan:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(range(20))
ax.axvspan(8, 14, ymin=0.1, ymax=0.9, alpha=0.5, color='red')
plt.show()