You can use Matplotlib to create a line chart with Python. Matplotlib is a plotting library for the Python programming language and its numerical mathematics extension numpy.

Python Courses
Complete Python Programming Course & Exercises

Line chart

The code creates a line plot in a graphical desktop window. This takes only a few lines. The dataset can be any set of numbers, in the example below we simply picked some random numbers for x.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = [2,3,4,5,7,9,13,15,17]
plt.plot(x)
plt.ylabel('Sunlight')
plt.xlabel('Time')
plt.show()

In the first two lines we include the numpy and matplotlib library. This contains logical functions to create line charts amongst others.

We define a list named x with a few random numbers and we set the x and y label. Finally we call the function show() which will display the line chart. If you do not call the show() function, nothing will be shown on the screen.

matplotlib-plot

Line plot colors

Plots support theming. It’s very easy to change the color of the line or the shape of it. By changing the plot function call to:

plt.plot(x, 'ro-')
we create a red graph with dots, where the r in ‘ro-‘ indicates red. Changing this to ‘bo-‘ would create a blue dotted line. If you only want to display the dots, use ‘ro’ or ‘bo’ instead.

Download examples