How to clear boxplots?

Dear Matlab-Users

Is there a way to efficiently delete all elements of a boxplot from a figure? This implementation does the job

delete(findobj(gca,'Tag','Box')); delete(findobj(gca,'Tag','Upper Adjacent Value')); delete(findobj(gca,'Tag','Lower Adjacent Value')); delete(findobj(gca,'Tag','Upper Whisker')); delete(findobj(gca,'Tag','Lower Whisker')); delete(findobj(gca,'Tag','Median')); delete(findobj(gca,'Tag','Outliers')); delete(findobj(gca,'Type','patch')); % the boxes are colored

But it is very slow and not feasible, since I deal with many axes (which are integrated in a GUI). This GUI allows the user to adjust the matrix X which is depicted by boxplot(X). I think that cla is not an option, since the axes contain other elements which need to stay visible. Any ideas?

boxplot(X,'Tag','box_plot'); delete(findobj(gca,'Tag','box_plot'));

is not allowed. How can I avoid this frequent call of findobj?

Thanks in advance.

Petra

Answer 1

[Jonathan Epperl]

You should capture the handles of the objects created by boxplot in a variable, then you can delete them all together without having to find them every time:

load carsmall
h = boxplot(MPG,Origin); % Now h contains the handles to every object created
text(3, 40,'blabla')
delete(h) % Note that the boxes and stuff are gone, the text is still there

[Matt Fig]

Petra, with graphics objects (figures, axes, lines, etc) it is always worthwhile to see if the creation call returns a handle. This will help you in further manipulations down the road, more than just deleting things....