#56 Hidden Y values when zero

[Guilherme]

I created the following function to make the value Y just be showed when is not 0(zero). So I set $plot->SetYLabelType('custom', 'labelYSemZero');.

function labelYSemZero($label) { if ($label == 0) return ''; return number_format($label,2,',','.'); }

Is it useful to show the value zero? Maybe it could have a flag or something like that to show or not value zero.

[lbayuk]

(Better late than never, maybe? Sorry.)

When this was opened, it seemed to me that the existing custom label formatting function was an acceptable solution. And I don't like adding narrowly targetted features (like "suppress zero in labels").

But recently I got an idea from spreadsheets, which have cell formatting (and a TEXT() function) that accept 1, 2, or 3 separate format controls, which are applied depending on the sign of the value. I tried something similar in PHPlot, by extending the 'printf' label format to accept 1, 2, or 3 formats.

With 1 format, it works as before: formats all labels with that format.

With 2 formats F1 and F2, it uses F1 for values >= 0, and F2 for values < 0.

With 3 formats F1, F2, and F3, it uses F1 for values > 0, F2 for values < 0, and F3 for values that are 0.

Your case then becomes something like this: $plot->SetYLabelType('printf', '%f', '-%f', '');

Note the minus sign is needed because the second format is applied to the absolute value. This lets you do things like '(%f)' to show negative values in parenthesis, as in some financial documents.

Yes this is a little more complex than a new method "SuppressZeros(True)", but is much more flexible.

[lbayuk]

Code changes, new test scripts, and documentation updates have been committed to SVN. This will be in the next release, 6.2.0.

[lbayuk]

Implemented in 6.2.0