Plotting a list of (x, y) coordinates

Question

I have a list of pairs (a, b) that I would like to plot with matplotlib in python as actual x-y coordinates. Currently, it is making two plots, where the index of the list gives the x-coordinate, and the first plot's y values are the as in the pairs and the second plot's y values are the bs in the pairs.

To clarify, my data looks like this: li = [(a,b), (c,d), ... , (t, u)] and I want to do a one-liner that just calls plt.plot(). If I didn't require a one-liner I could trivially do:

xs = [x[0] for x in li]
ys = [x[1] for x in li]
plt.plot(xs, ys)

How can I get matplotlib to plot these pairs as x-y coordinates?

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Sample data

# sample data
li = list(zip(range(1, 14), range(14, 27)))

li → [(1, 14), (2, 15), (3, 16), (4, 17), (5, 18), (6, 19), (7, 20), (8, 21), (9, 22), (10, 23), (11, 24), (12, 25), (13, 26)]

Incorrect Plot

plt.plot(li)
plt.title('Incorrect Plot:\nEach index of the tuple plotted as separate lines')

Desired Plot

This produces the correct plot, but to many lines of code are used to unpack li. I need to unpack and plot with a single line of code, not multiple list-comprehensions.

xs = [x[0] for x in li]
ys = [x[1] for x in li]
plt.plot(xs, ys)
plt.title('Correct Plot:\nBut uses to many lines to unpack li')

Answer 1

Given li in the question:

li = list(zip(range(1, 14), range(14, 27)))

To unpack the data from pairs into lists use zip:

x, y = zip(*li)

x → (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)
y → (14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26)

The one-liner uses the unpacking operator (*), to unpack the list of tuples for zip, and unpacks the zip object into the plot API.

plt.scatter(*zip(*li))

plt.plot(*zip(*li))