Drawing a rectangle with Matplotlib

I’m writing a python function to draw a simple rectangle, the vertex points are parameters. Well, this does not work correctly and I can’t seem to find out why its plotting all over the place. EDIT: as for my imports. So sp is sympy. As for the expected result to draw a rectangle of course.

%matplotlib inline
import sympy as sp
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import math

def draw_rectangle(P1,P2,P3,P4):
    p1, p2, p3, p4 = sp.Point(P1[0], P1[1]), sp.Point(P2[0], P2[1]), sp.Point(P3[0], P3[1]), 
    sp.Point(P4[0], P4[1])
    plt.plot(p1,p2)
    plt.plot(p2,p3)
    plt.plot(p3,p4)
    plt.plot(p4,p1)

P1=[20,30]
P2=[40,30]
P3=[40,60]
P4=[20,60]
draw_rectangle(P1,P2,P3,P4)

Actual Outcome with this code

Answer

The delivery of the x-y coordinates is mixed up in your code. p1 is still in the same form as P1, i.e., an x-y pair. But matplotlib plt.plot() expects a list of x-values followed by a list of y-values. Hence, this misunderstanding – matplotlib interpreted in plt.plot(p1,p2) p1 as two x-values and p2 as two y-values. So, we have to chain the x- and the y-values together before plotting.

import sympy as sp
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def draw_rectangle(P1,P2,P3,P4):
    p1, p2 = sp.Point(P1[0], P1[1]), sp.Point(P2[0], P2[1])
    p3, p4 = sp.Point(P3[0], P3[1]), sp.Point(P4[0], P4[1])
    plt.plot(*zip(p1,p2))
    plt.plot(*zip(p2,p3))
    plt.plot(*zip(p3,p4))
    plt.plot(*zip(p4,p1))
    #or alternatively
    #plt.plot(*zip(p1, p2, p3, p4, p1))

P1=[20,30]
P2=[40,30]
P3=[40,60]
P4=[20,60]

draw_rectangle(P1,P2,P3,P4)
plt.show()

Sample output:

However, it remains unclear why you converted your data into sympy points before plotting. You could have directly used P1, P2,…, but maybe this is required for some other program parts we are not aware of. Or you actually wanted to use another sympy function, not sp.point, but I don’t speak fluent sympy, so cannot comment on that.