timefmt with splot?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

  Colin> I have tried to use "using" but I cannot figure out what arguments
  Colin> to pass to it. Any ideas?

I tried similar things with 2d plots, and it failed exactly there. 

However, I got it to work starting from a working setup in 'plain gnuplot'
(ie outside of Octave) and to then to pass those very commands to gnuplot 
in a pipe. Ie

  fid = popen("gnuplot", "w");
  fputs(fid, "set timefmt \"%Y%m%d\"\n");       <---------- parse time
  fputs(fid, "set xdata time\n");               <---------- & display time
  fputs(fid, "set format x \"%m/%y\"\n");       <---------- this way

[... more settings omitted ...]

  fputs(fid, sprintf(["plot [\"%d\":\"%d\"] \"%s\" u 1:2 ax x1y1, ", \
                      "'' u 1:3 ax x1y2\n"], \
                     fromdate, todate, tmpfile));
  pclose(fid);

You can also write your data to the same pipe, try 'help plot datafile' 
from within gnuplot.

Hope this helps,  Dirk

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