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gnuplot

plotting matrix-like data as points

I have data which looks like this:

label1: <set of increasing numbers 1..500>
label2: <set of increasing numbers 1..500>

etc

I would like to make a picture out of that would look something like:

label1    ...           ...............         .... .   . 
label2      ................           .............. 
etc

           1 2 3 ...                                       500

Can this be done with gnuplot in some relatively straightforward way? I can transform the data into any form easily, i just don't know what to feed into gnuplot.

Solution

  • maybe, we need some visual example here to find out what you really want. The follwing should be a copy&paste code. If you are reading your data from a file, replace $Data in the plot command by your filename, e.g. 'Data.dat'. Does this come closer what you want?

    reset session

$Data <<EOD
label1  label2  label3
1   3   6
2   6   9
20  23  31
21  26  34
22  25  29
56  50  44
57  58  55
58  60  70
59  65  85
EOD

set colorsequence classic
set key top left
set yrange [0.5:3.5]
plot for [i=1:*] $Data u i:(i):ytic(columnhead(i)) with points pointtype 7 pointsize 2 notitle

    which should result in:

    enter image description here

    Addition: The following code is an ugly workaround to basically transpose the data with gnuplot. The plotting result should be basically the same as above, except I made the rows different in length by removing and adding some points.

    ### plotting rows with different length
reset session

$DataInRows <<EOD
label1  1   2   20  21  22  56  57  58  59
label2  3   6   23  26  25  50  58
label3  6   9   31  34  29  44  55  70  88  90
EOD

stats $DataInRows u 0 nooutput   # get the number of rows
RowCount = STATS_records
array Rows[RowCount]   # define an array

# put rows as string into the array
set table $Dummy
    MaxColCount = 0
    set datafile separator "\n"        # full lines 
    # get the lines into array and at the same time determine the maximum number of columns
    plot $DataInRows u (Rows[$0+1]=stringcolumn(1), \
        MaxColCount = words(Rows[$0+1]) > MaxColCount ? words(Rows[$0+1]) : MaxColCount) \
        with table 
    set datafile separator whitespace  # set back to default
unset table
print MaxColCount

set print $Data  # print into dataset
do for [j=1:MaxColCount] {
    tmp = ''
    do for [i=1:RowCount] {
        tmp = i > 1 ? tmp."\t".word(Rows[i],j) : word(Rows[i],j)
    }
    print tmp
}
set print 

set colorsequence classic
set yrange [0.5:3.5]
plot for[i=1:RowCount] $Data u i:(i):ytic(columnhead(i)) w p pt 7 ps 2 notitle
### end of code