Pretty Python Plotting With CairoPlot Page 2

Generating a Pie Chart

How do you generate a pie chart from a dictionary? It only takes one line:

CairoPlot.pie_plot("piechart", rejected, 500, 500, None, True, False, None)

CairoPlot will produce a graphics file named pie.svg.

The arguments are:

pie_plot(name,
         data,
         width, height,
         background=None,
         gradient=False, shadow=False,
         colors=None)

name is the filename. If you include an extension such as .jpg, CairoPlot will use that format instead of SVG format, in case you need a graphic that even IE users can view on a website.

data, of course, is the dictionary of values.

width and height are the desired size of the plot. Notice that CairoPlot leaves quite a bit of extra space around the outside of the pie, so plan accordingly.

background lets you specify a background color as a tuple of red, green and blue, so background=(0, 1, 0) would give a solid green background. You can also pass a Cairo gradient here. gradient specifies whether the pie slices themselves should show a gradient, which makes the plot prettier. shadow lets you add a drop shadow on the whole piechart, and you can pass an array of custom colors--again, tuples or gradients--if you don't like the default colors. The colors list must have exactly the same number of entries as the data dictionary.

A minor problem with the chart in we just created: It turns out most hosts with invalid HELO addresses aren't resolvable at all, and the rest of the chart gets all squinched into a tiny piece of pie. What happens if you toss out all those unknowns? You can do that by adding one else clause after the if hostname:

        if hostname :
            dot = hostname.rfind(".")
            if dot >= 0 :
                ext = hostname[dot+1:]
        else :
            continue

Run that, and you get a competely different pie chat Quite interesting! I had no idea, before writing this example, that I got so much spam from Israel and Brazil compared to other countries. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Bar Charts

CairoPlot makes pretty bar charts, too. Unfortunately, CairoPlot's various methods aren't consistent about their input, and bar_plot wants a list, not a dictionary.

No problem! Just convert that dictionary to two lists -- one for the labels, one for the data -- and call bar_plot:

h_labels = [ k for k in rejected.keys() ]
rejlist = [ rejected[k] for k in rejected.keys() ]
CairoPlot.bar_plot ('bars', rejlist, 500, 400,
                    border=5, three_dimension=True,
                    h_labels=h_labels)

Again, you can pass a list of colors if you want custom colors, and there are a few other options available, like background, grid, rounded_corners, h_bounds and v_bounds, and of course v_labels as well as h_labels.

Of course, CairoPlot can do other types of graphs as well. There's some documentation here, or you can use the interactive Python interpreter and type

import CairoPlot
help(CairoPlot.pie_plot)

Eventually, CairoPlot may move to Sourceforge and have a more organized website. But in the meantime, if you experiment a bit, you'll find it's one of the best packages around for making pretty, colorful graphs.

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