Re: Extracting data points from Plot[]
- To: mathgroup at christensen.cybernetics.net
- Subject: [mg797] Re: Extracting data points from Plot[]
- From: villegas (Robert Villegas)
- Date: Wed, 19 Apr 1995 00:48:34 -0400
- Organization: Wolfram Research, Inc.
I just noticed something from Jon Guyer's post, which deserves a couple
comments. He was plotting several functions, not just one, and I had
the plotting of a single function in mind in my last post.
[his example]
> Plot[{x,x^2},{x,0,2}];
Something that might not be immediately obvious (I didn't realize it
until someone sent in a question a while back) is that if you give
Plot a list of functions, it samples them separately, in order. They
may behave very differently on the domain, and require completely
different distributions of sample points to be graphed smoothly.
A quick way to show this is to make two functions that store samples
in different lists when they are evaluated, and then look at the lists
afterwards. I set PlotPoints and PlotDivision low, so that not many
samples would be generated and the lists wouldn't take up much space
on the page.
In[1]:= f[x_] := (AppendTo[fList, x]; x)
In[2]:= g[x_] := (AppendTo[gList, x]; x^2)
In[3]:= fList = gList = {}
Out[3]= {}
In[4]:= Plot[{f[x], g[x]}, {x, -3, 3}, PlotPoints->5, PlotDivision->5]
Out[4]= -Graphics-
In[5]:= fList
Out[5]= {-3., -1.5, 0., 1.5, 3.}
(* x^2 is a more active function than x is, so it needs more sampling: *)
In[6]:= gList
Out[6]= {-3., -1.5, 0., -2.25, -0.75, -1.875, -1.125, -0.375, -0.9375,
> -0.5625, 1.5, 0.75, 0.375, -0.1875, 0.1875, 1.125, 0.5625, 3., 2.25,
> 1.875}
So this is one important thing to know if you're using the AppendTo trick
to store samples.
Also, this affects the way I used Cases to extract the Line objects
out of the Graphics expression. If you're plotting several functions,
not just one like I was assuming, you need to modify that method.
Here's an example of how to do it (the only difference is the use of
Map):
In[4]:= p = Plot[{x, x^2, x^3}, {x, 0, 1}]
Out[4]= -Graphics-
In[5]:= data = First[p];
In[6]:= {curve1, curve2, curve3} =
Map[Cases[#, Line[pts_] :> pts, -1]&, data];
The first part of the Graphics expression, which I called 'data',
still contains all the Line objects you want. The first element
of 'data' will contain the Line's (possibly just one) for the first
function, the second element of 'data' will contain the Line's for
the second function, and so on. This keeps the curves separate, and
knowing this, you can extract separate lists of points.
I'm sorry that my first post probably caused confusion for people trying
to use the Cases method directly on a plot of several functions.
Robby Villegas