How to treat the first line of the data file as column labels in gnuplot?

Question

I have a table like this:

A B C D E F G H I 
10 23998 16755 27656 17659 19708 20328 19377 18925
20 37298 33368 53936 41421 44548 40756 40985 37294

I use this command to plot

plot "C:/file.txt" using 1:2 with lines smooth bezier, "C:/file.txt" using 1:3 with lines smooth bezier, ...

However, all the labels come out as the file name. Is it possible for gnuplot to read the first row and label the lines accordingly?

I suppose this is a cmd.exe command line parsing issue rather than a gnuplot issue. Can you line out the desired command line syntax for those who have no knowledge of gnuplot? — Tomalak, Apr 21 '09 at 17:50
Hmm.. I'm not sure what you mean. All this happens purely in gnuplot. — Verhogen, Apr 21 '09 at 19:51
@Tomalak: this is done in the gnuplot shell, it has nothing to do with cmd.exe command-line parsing. (The same thing happens on Linux) — David Z, Apr 21 '09 at 20:31
For those that want to name axis labels in a scatter plot: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16089301/how-do-i-set-axis-label-with-column-header-in-gnuplot — Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com, Apr 27 '19 at 16:44

score 34 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 21 '09 at 21:05

34

set key autotitle columnhead

answered Apr 21 '09 at 21:05

Svante

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Is there a way to do this if the header starts with a hash? – TomCho Mar 30 '15 at 18:37

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 18 '22 at 23:32

4

plot for [n=2:12] 'vv.csv' u 1:(column(n)) w lines title columnhead(n)

n starts from 2 to skip the header.

edited Nov 18 '22 at 23:32

beliz

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answered Nov 02 '12 at 02:14

Elden Crom

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 21 '09 at 20:31

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I checked the documentation and I don't see a way to do it automatically, but you can manually set a title with

plot "file.txt" using 1:2 title "A" with lines smooth bezier ...

answered Apr 21 '09 at 20:31

David Z

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if the data format is ecactly the way you described in your question I would use this manual aproach as well – Peter S Oct 19 '15 at 13:06

score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 21 '09 at 20:51

I once wrote a script to plot FM radio station frequencies along an axis from 87MHz to 108MHz, using the names of each radio station as vertical labels. This was not a pure gnuplot solution, the input file is processed with perl with make, but I suggest you have a look at it and see if you can use something like that.

score -1 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 21 '09 at 20:57

-1

You could also use a gnuplot toolkit such as this one for Python if you want have a lot of data to plot and you want to automate the extraction of the titles.

answered Apr 21 '09 at 20:57

moinudin

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How to treat the first line of the data file as column labels in gnuplot?

5 Answers5

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