numpy.meshgrid()

Return coordinate matrices from coordinate vectors.

Make N-D coordinate arrays for vectorized evaluations of N-D scalar/vector fields over N-D grids, given one-dimensional coordinate arrays x1, x2,..., xn.

Notes

This function supports both indexing conventions through the indexing keyword argument. Giving the string ?ij? returns a meshgrid with matrix indexing, while ?xy? returns a meshgrid with Cartesian indexing. In the 2-D case with inputs of length M and N, the outputs are of shape (N, M) for ?xy? indexing and (M, N) for ?ij? indexing. In the 3-D case with inputs of length M, N and P, outputs are of shape (N, M, P) for ?xy? indexing and (M, N, P) for ?ij? indexing. The difference is illustrated by the following code snippet:

xv, yv = meshgrid(x, y, sparse=False, indexing='ij')
for i in range(nx):
    for j in range(ny):
        # treat xv[i,j], yv[i,j]

xv, yv = meshgrid(x, y, sparse=False, indexing='xy')
for i in range(nx):
    for j in range(ny):
        # treat xv[j,i], yv[j,i]

In the 1-D and 0-D case, the indexing and sparse keywords have no effect.

Examples

>>> nx, ny = (3, 2)
>>> x = np.linspace(0, 1, nx)
>>> y = np.linspace(0, 1, ny)
>>> xv, yv = meshgrid(x, y)
>>> xv
array([[ 0. ,  0.5,  1. ],
       [ 0. ,  0.5,  1. ]])
>>> yv
array([[ 0.,  0.,  0.],
       [ 1.,  1.,  1.]])
>>> xv, yv = meshgrid(x, y, sparse=True)  # make sparse output arrays
>>> xv
array([[ 0. ,  0.5,  1. ]])
>>> yv
array([[ 0.],
       [ 1.]])

meshgrid is very useful to evaluate functions on a grid.

>>> x = np.arange(-5, 5, 0.1)
>>> y = np.arange(-5, 5, 0.1)
>>> xx, yy = meshgrid(x, y, sparse=True)
>>> z = np.sin(xx**2 + yy**2) / (xx**2 + yy**2)
>>> h = plt.contourf(x,y,z)