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matlabmatlab-figure

matlab plots vertical lines when it's not in the data

I am trying to plot data in matlab that doesn't (as far as I can tell) contain vertical lines. However when I plot it I get lots of vertical lines. I'm guessing there's some little syntax thing that I don't know about but I can't find any similar questions.

>> whos t 
Name      Size                Bytes  Class     Attributes

t         1x33715            269720  double

>> whos nascent_ts
Name            Size                   Bytes  Class     Attributes

nascent_ts      4x6x33715            6473280  double

plot(t,squeeze(squeeze(nascent_ts(1,1,:))))

Here is the plot:

plot

I've tried transposing both sides but that had no effect. I just can't see how this could even happen. Here's some more info about what's actually going into the plot.

>> tmp=squeeze(squeeze(nascent_ts(1,1,:)));
>> whos tmp
Name          Size             Bytes  Class     Attributes

tmp       33715x1             269720  double
Solution

  • The "vertical lines" that you are seeing is simply the result of MATLAB's plot functionality connecting all of your data points with lines. The vertical lines are where you have a low-valued data point followed by a high value data point.

    To get around this, you can either specify a non-line (marker-only) style to plot

    plot(t,squeeze(squeeze(nascent_ts(1,1,:))), '.')

    Or you can set the LineStyle property of your existing line object

    h = plot(t,squeeze(squeeze(nascent_ts(1,1,:))));
set(h, 'LineStyle', 'none', 'Marker', '.')