Defining plot options once and call them for several subplots

Question

I am using several subplots. In these subplots data is plotted using imshow. The options I pass to imshow are identical for almost all of the subplots. However, they pollute my code due to the length of the options.

The options I use include:

• extent
• cmap
• norm
• origin
• interpolation

To have a better overview of my code I would like to define the options once and call them for each subplot. What is a pythonic way to do this?

Answer 1

You can store the options in a dictionary and then unpack them within the function call using the **kwargs operator, as below (example uses plot rather than imshow but it's the same idea).

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

options = {'linewidth':2,
           'color':'red',
           'linestyle':'dashed'}

x = np.linspace(0,10,100)
y = x**2

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.plot(x,y, **options)

plt.show()

Above I have stored the options in the options dictionary and then unpacked them within the plot function call with ax.plot(x,y, **options).