Linestyle in matplotlib step function

Question

Is it possible to set the linestyle in a matplotlib step function to dashed, dotted, etc.?

I've tried:

step(x, linestyle='--'), 
step(x, '--')

But it did not help.

Answer 1

As of mpl 1.3.0 this is fixed upstream

---

You have to come at it a bit sideways as step seems to ignore linestyle. If you look at what step is doing underneath, it is just a thin wrapper for plot.

You can do what you want by talking to plot directly:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot(range(5), range(5), linestyle='--', drawstyle='steps')
plt.plot(range(5), range(5)[::-1], linestyle=':', drawstyle='steps')
plt.xlim([-1, 5])
plt.ylim([-1, 5])

['steps', 'steps-pre', 'steps-mid', 'steps-post'] are the valid values for drawstyle and control where the step is drawn.

Pull request resulting from this question, I personally think this is a bug. [edit: this has been pulled into master and should show up in v1.3.0].