Is there a clean way to generate a line histogram chart in Python?

Question

I need to create a histogram that plots a line and not a step or bar chart. I am using python 2.7 The plt.hist function below plots a stepped line and the bins don\'t line up i

Answer 1

Matplotlib's thumbnail gallery is usually quite helpful in situations like yours. A combination of this and this one from the gallery with some customizations is probably very close to what you have in mind:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.mlab as mlab
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

mu = 0
sigma = 1
noise = np.random.normal(mu, sigma, size=1000)
num_bins = 7
n, bins, _ = plt.hist(noise, num_bins, normed=1, histtype='step')
y = mlab.normpdf(bins, mu, sigma)
plt.plot(bins, y, 'r--')
plt.show()

Also, increasing the number of bins helps...