Re: [O] Plotting (with gnuplot) using dates timestamps

[Alan Schmitt]

On 26 mars 2012, at 16:37, Nick Dokos wrote:

> Steven Buczkowski <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 2012-03-26 at 15:37 +0200, Alan Schmitt wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> I'm trying to plot the following table, but the dates part is all wrong. Is 
>>> there a way to tell gnuplot what the date format is?
>>> 
>>> #+tblname: data-table
>>> | Date             |     HP |     HC |
>>> |------------------+--------+--------|
>>> | [2011-08-20 Sat] | 006815 | 008399 |
>>> | [2011-08-29 Mon] | 006840 | 008438 |
>>> | [2011-09-11 Sun] | 006946 | 008552 |
>>> | [2011-12-11 Sun] | 007805 | 009603 |
>>> | [2012-03-04 Sun] | 008800 | 010826 |
>>> | [2012-03-11 Sun] | 008876 | 010930 |
>>> | [2012-03-25 Sun] | 009015 | 011121 |
>>> 
>> 
>> In straight gnuplot, I would do something like the following:
>> 
>> gnuplot> set xdata time
>> gnuplot> set timefmt '[%Y-%m-%d %a]'
>> 
> 
> The "set xdata time" line is indeed what makes the difference:
> without it, gnuplot doesn't know that this is a time series.
> But there are some additional details: when babel prepares the
> data, the data file that will be fed to gnuplot ends up like this
> (not sure this is documented though):
> 
> ,----
> | 2011-08-20-00:00:00 6815    8399
> | 2011-08-29-00:00:00 6840    8438
> | 2011-09-11-00:00:00 6946    8552
> | 2011-12-11-00:00:00 7805    9603
> | 2012-03-04-00:00:00 8800    10826
> | 2012-03-11-00:00:00 8876    10930
> | 2012-03-25-00:00:00 9015    11121
> `----

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions. The part I was missing was the 
preprocessing from babel. Using simply

set xdata time
set timefmt "%Y-%m-%d"

did the trick.

And yes: the gnuplot built-in help seems very complete.

Thanks again,

Alan