How to “clean the slate”?

Question

I want to make a series of plots, and save each to a file. But I don\'t know how to wipe previous plots off. Maybe I need to create some new object for each time, but I don\'t w

Answer 1

DO NOT create a new figure each time with plt.figure(), you'll wind up running out of memory rather quickly. Instead use (for the figure and the axes respectively):

plt.clf()
plt.cla()

You can run plt.close() to free up the allocation, however there has been some discussion that this method has lead to memory leaks in the past. A quick test shows that in version 1.1.1rc this works without problems, so feel free to use it as an alternative. A useful related question discuses the differences between the methods.