How to Change Order of Items in Matplotlib Legend?

How to Change Order of Items in Matplotlib Legend?

In matplotlib, you can manually control the order of items in a legend using the handles and labels arguments of the legend function. Here's how you can do it:

  1. Capture the plot elements (lines, patches, etc.) when creating the plot:
    • When you create each plot element, such as with plot or scatter, you can capture the returned object(s) in variables.
  2. Manually specify the order using handles and labels arguments:
    • When you call the legend function, pass a list of these captured plot elements to the handles argument in the order you want them to appear in the legend.
    • Also pass a list of corresponding labels to the labels argument.

Here's an example to illustrate this:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # Sample data x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] y1 = [1, 4, 9, 16, 25] y2 = [25, 16, 9, 4, 1] # Create the plot elements line1, = plt.plot(x, y1, label='y = x^2') line2, = plt.plot(x, y2, label='y = (6-x)^2') # Manually specify the order of items in the legend handles = [line2, line1] labels = [handle.get_label() for handle in handles] plt.legend(handles=handles, labels=labels) plt.show()

In the example above, the line y = (6-x)^2 will appear before y = x^2 in the legend, even though it was plotted after.

You can use this method to have full control over the legend item order, especially when there are multiple plot elements or more complex plots.

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