GNU Scientific Library – Reference Manual: Example programs for histograms

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### 23.11 Example programs for histograms

The following program shows how to make a simple histogram of a column of numerical data supplied on `stdin`. The program takes three arguments, specifying the upper and lower bounds of the histogram and the number of bins. It then reads numbers from `stdin`, one line at a time, and adds them to the histogram. When there is no more data to read it prints out the accumulated histogram using `gsl_histogram_fprintf`.

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <gsl/gsl_histogram.h>

    int
    main (int argc, char **argv)
    {
      double a, b;
      size_t n;

      if (argc != 4)
        {
          printf ("Usage: gsl-histogram xmin xmax n\n"
                  "Computes a histogram of the data "
                  "on stdin using n bins from xmin "
                  "to xmax\n");
          exit (0);
        }

      a = atof (argv[1]);
      b = atof (argv[2]);
      n = atoi (argv[3]);

      {
        double x;
        gsl_histogram * h = gsl_histogram_alloc (n);
        gsl_histogram_set_ranges_uniform (h, a, b);

        while (fscanf (stdin, "%lg", &x) == 1)
          {
            gsl_histogram_increment (h, x);
          }
        gsl_histogram_fprintf (stdout, h, "%g", "%g");
        gsl_histogram_free (h);
      }
      exit (0);
    }

Here is an example of the program in use. We generate 10000 random samples from a Cauchy distribution with a width of 30 and histogram them over the range -100 to 100, using 200 bins.

    $ gsl-randist 0 10000 cauchy 30
       | gsl-histogram -100 100 200 > histogram.dat

A plot of the resulting histogram shows the familiar shape of the Cauchy distribution and the fluctuations caused by the finite sample size.

    $ awk '{print $1, $3 ; print $2, $3}' histogram.dat
       | graph -T X