How to set my legend differently from my plotting?

I have a figure with 10 pairs of plots. Below is an example of one pair.

plot(x, y, 'r.', "LineWidth", 1);
p1 = pchip(x, y, xq);
plot(xq, p1, 'r-', "LineWidth", 1);

Basically, I first plot the dots and then their pchip line, thus having two symbols for each variable.

In my lengend, how do I have one symbol like the below:

'.-'

for each variable with a total of 10 legend inputs, instead of having 10 x 2 = 20 lengend inputs (dots and lines are treated as two separate inputs), as the default does?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

[Olaf Bousche]

You can use the line handles to do this. For each plot j store the handle:

p_handles(1) = plot(x, y, 'r.', "LineWidth", 1, "DisplayName","I want this");

p1 = pchip(x, y, xq);

p_handles(2) = plot(xq, p1, 'r-', "LineWidth", 1, "DisplayName","I do not want this");

Then when calling the legend

legend(p_handles(1:2:end),"show")

Different symbols won't work but when you stick to similar colors or something of that nature, things will be obvious for the reader.

[Leon]

Many thanks. When I tried it out, I got the below error:

Error using legend
Invalid argument. Type 'help legend' for more information.

Error in untitled (line 15)
legend(p_handles(1:2),"show")

[Olaf Bousche]

Sorry about that. I forgot the "hold on" and the "show" is not needed. Working example:

for j = 1:6

p(j) = plot(rand(10,1),"DisplayName",compose("plot %d",j));

hold on

end

legend(p(1:2:end))

Hope this works for you