How to specify axes range in matplotlib plot?

The axes range is specified with matplotlib.pyplot.xlim(specify range) or with matplotlib.pyplot.ylim(specify range). The general form of both functions can be written as:

matplotlib.pyplot.xlim(*args, **kwargs)
matplotlib.pyplot.ylim(*args, **kwargs)

In previous lines of code, the *args allows us to pass the variable number of non-keyword arguments to function. The **kwargs allows us to pass the variable length of keyword arguments to the function. Usually, the xlim and ylim are defined as:

plt.xlim(lower_value, upper_value)
plt.ylim(lower_value, upper_value)

where lower_value and upper_value are numbers (type: float) that define the limits of xlim and ylim in which we want to show the plot.
Example Create the plot of \(y(t) = \sin(t)\) function and set limit of x-axis in range from 0 to 20 and limit on y-axis from -1.0 to 1.0.
Solution: First we will create a plot to see the plot without the limits. To generate the data that will be plotted we have to import the numpy library. Then generate x-coordinates in range from 0 to 20.01 with step size of 0.01 (arbitrary step) using np.arange function and assign it to t variable. The next step is to generate the y-coordinates as a list using the x-coordinate values and the numpy function sin().

import numpy as np
t = np.arange(0, 20.01, 0.01)
y = [np.sin(t[i]) for i in range(len(t))]

The next step is to plot the function with a grid with xlables and ylabels set to "t [s]" and "y(t) [m]".

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure(figsize=(12,8))
plt.plot(t,y)
plt.grid(True)
plt.xlabel("t [s]")
plt.ylabel("y(t) [m]")
plt.show()

The entire code created in this example, so far, is given below.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
t = np.arange(0,20.01,0.01)
y = [np.sin(t[i]) for i in range(len(t))]
plt.figure(figsize=(12,8))
plt.plot(t,y)
plt.grid(True)
plt.xlabel("t[s]")
plt.ylabel("y(t) [m]")
plt.show()

The result of the previous code is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 - The plot of \(y(t)\) function without defined x and y limits. Now we are going to set the xlim from 0 to 20 and ylim from -1.0 and 1.0 by typing:

plt.xlim(0,20)
plt.ylim(-1.0, 1.0)

The entire code is given below.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
t = np.arange(0,20.01,0.01)
y = [np.sin(t[i]) for i in range(len(t))]
plt.figure(figsize=(12,8))
plt.plot(t,y)
plt.grid(True)
plt.xlabel("t[s]")
plt.ylabel("y(t) [m]")
plt.xlim(0,20)
plt.ylim(-1,1)
plt.show()

The result of the previous code is shown in Figure 2. Figure 2 - The plot of \(y(t)\) function with defined x and y limits.