Gnuplot: Plot row-wise and named data as bundle of differently colored and titled lines

Question

I\'m trying to plot a bundle of graphs that are currently stored like this:

MyFile.txt

\"ID01\" 1 2 3 4 5
\"ID02\" 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
\"I         


        

Answer 1

This is not the way gnuplot uses to save data. Your approach has also other problems, i.e. you don't actually have a matrix if the rows have different number of points etc. The gnuplot way of handling such data would be to separate points belonging to different lines with two blank lines, and add the respective header before:

"ID01"
1
2
3
4
5


"ID02"
3
4
5
6
7
8
9


"ID03"
4
3
1
2
3
4

And then plot the data with

set key autotitle columnheader left
plot for [i=0:2] 'MyFile.txt' using 0:1 index i with linespoints

Alternatively, if you prefer a more compact representation, you can save each line in a column. But then you must make sure, that shorter columns are filled up with empty values. For that one should use e.g. comma as field separators:

"ID01","ID02","ID03"
1,3,4
2,4,3
3,5,1
4,6,2
5,7,3
 ,8,4
 ,9,

and plot with

set key autotitle columnheader
set datafile separator ','
plot for [i=1:3] 'MyFile.csv' using 0:i with linespoints