iterating markers in plots

Using several markers in a single scatter is currently not a feature matplotlib supports. There is however a feature request for this at https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/11155

It is of course possible to draw several scatters, one for each marker type.
A different option is the one I proposed in the above thread, which is to set the markers after creating the scatter:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def mscatter(x,y,ax=None, m=None, **kw):
    import matplotlib.markers as mmarkers
    if not ax: ax=plt.gca()
    sc = ax.scatter(x,y,**kw)
    if (m is not None) and (len(m)==len(x)):
        paths = []
        for marker in m:
            if isinstance(marker, mmarkers.MarkerStyle):
                marker_obj = marker
            else:
                marker_obj = mmarkers.MarkerStyle(marker)
            path = marker_obj.get_path().transformed(
                        marker_obj.get_transform())
            paths.append(path)
        sc.set_paths(paths)
    return sc


N = 40
x, y, c = np.random.rand(3, N)
s = np.random.randint(10, 220, size=N)
m = np.repeat(["o", "s", "D", "*"], N/4)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

scatter = mscatter(x, y, c=c, s=s, m=m, ax=ax)

plt.show()

enter image description here

If you only have numbers, instead of marker symbols you would first need to map numbers to symbols and supply the list of symbols to the function.

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