CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gnuplot
mike3996
mike3996

Reputation: 17517

Plot day events from date and value in Gnuplot

I have data of this format:

2011-06-22 22:33:19  23  15
2011-06-23 09:46:13  12  79
2011-06-24 12:31:09  31  4
2011-06-24 17:34:10  7   2
2011-06-25 16:42:43  44  14
2011-06-25 20:26:52  54  9
2011-06-26 19:34:29  217 28

How can I create a histogram of daily activities with Gnuplot? By default, using these settings:

set xdata time
set timefmt "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"
set style data boxes
set grid
plot 'data' using 1:3 t "ins", \
     'data' using 1:4 t 'dels'

the boxes will fit next to each other. But I would like to leave noneventful days at 0. Just like the Reputation graph here in StackOverflow behaves. If there's nothing on a given day, it should leave an empty place in the graph. If there's one event for one day, that box should be about the maximum width for one day. If there are more than one to given day, they all should be fit to that width.

Setting boxwidth is tricky because any value seem to give me 1-pixel wide "boxes".

Thanks kindly.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1237

Answers (1)

Woltan
Woltan

Reputation: 14023

if I understand you correctly, then what you are trying to do is to my knowledge not possible with gnuplot. Or at least not in an easy way. And this is the reason why I think you'll have a hard time:

You cannot plot different box widths in a single plot. So trying to plot no box on an "non eventful" day and a single column on a day with one event will work just fine. Plotting multiple columns on one day where more than one event occurs in the same plot will fail because:

  1. You cannot set different box sizes in the same plot
  2. You need to offset the boxes on the same day according to the amount of events

There are ways to work around that problem for example plot two boxes of the same color next to each other to "simulate" a single box on one day and then make use of the smaller box width on days with two events. But this will very soon get pretty hairy and hard to maintain.
Maybe you want to think about using a different plot style? Take a look at histograms like here. Maybe one of the styles suites your data better. Or you could think about splitting your plot up into multiple plots?

Upvotes: 2

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