python: how to plot one line in different colors

There are several different ways to do this. The “best” approach will depend mostly on how many line segments you want to plot.

If you’re just going to be plotting a handful (e.g. 10) line segments, then just do something like:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def uniqueish_color():
    """There're better ways to generate unique colors, but this isn't awful."""
    return plt.cm.gist_ncar(np.random.random())

xy = (np.random.random((10, 2)) - 0.5).cumsum(axis=0)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for start, stop in zip(xy[:-1], xy[1:]):
    x, y = zip(start, stop)
    ax.plot(x, y, color=uniqueish_color())
plt.show()

If you’re plotting something with a million line segments, though, this will be terribly slow to draw. In that case, use a LineCollection. E.g.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.collections import LineCollection

xy = (np.random.random((1000, 2)) - 0.5).cumsum(axis=0)

# Reshape things so that we have a sequence of:
# [[(x0,y0),(x1,y1)],[(x0,y0),(x1,y1)],...]
xy = xy.reshape(-1, 1, 2)
segments = np.hstack([xy[:-1], xy[1:]])

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
coll = LineCollection(segments, cmap=plt.cm.gist_ncar)
coll.set_array(np.random.random(xy.shape[0]))

ax.add_collection(coll)
ax.autoscale_view()

plt.show()

For both of these cases, we’re just drawing random colors from the “gist_ncar” coloramp. Have a look at the colormaps here (gist_ncar is about 2/3 of the way down): http://matplotlib.org/examples/color/colormaps_reference.html