Matplotlib can't find documented function set_cmap

Question

I have the following code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.cm.set_cmap("Blues")

This gives me an error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ".\lorenz_explorer.py", line 12, in <module>
    plt.cm.set_cmap("Blues")
AttributeError: module 'matplotlib.cm' has no attribute 'set_cmap'

My matplotlib version is 3.3.1, and the function certainly exists in the documentation for 3.3.1: Link

Then am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? Do I need to import matplotlib.cm separately or something along those lines?

Answer 1

As the documentation link you provide shows, the name of the function is matplotlib.pyplot.set_cmap , not matplotlib.pyplot.cm.set_cmap . So you can call it with plt.set_cmap("Blues") .

In other words, the function is not part of the cm library, which is somewhat counter-intuitive.