[Matplotlib-users] Omitting curves from a legend

[Bill B. <wb...@gm...>]

There are a couple things about legend that I'm finding a little
irksome.  Is there some better way to do this?

1) if you have a contour, legend() wants to add all the contours to
the list.  calling contour(...,label='_nolegend_') doesn't seem to
help.

I'm trying to plot a bunch of different types of markers on top of a
contour plot, and put just the markers in the legend.  The workaround
seems to be
    contour(. . . )
    p1 = plot( . . .)
    p2 = plot(. . .)
    . . .
    pN = plot(. . .)

    legend((p1,p2,...,pN), ('Legend1', 'Legend2', ... , 'LegendN'))
    Basically I have to save the plot data and repeat myself later.

2) The '_nolegend_' trick doesn't work for things in the simple call
style for legend()

     legend('_nolegend_', 'Data 1', 'Data 2')

That makes a legend containing the string "_nolegend_".

My first hunch to do that before looking at the docs at all was to put
in a None for a legend I wanted to leave off.  That's raises an error
though.  Might be nice if it was made a legal way to omit something
from the legend.

--bb