box

Aliases: boxplot

The box command renders box-and-whisker plots showing the five-number summary (minimum, first quartile, median, third quartile, maximum) for one or more numeric series.

Usage

uplot box [options]
uplot boxplot [options]

Input format

Multi-column numeric data. Each column is treated as a separate series and rendered as its own box. With -H, column headers become the series labels on the left edge of the plot.

uplot box -H -d, < iris.csv

Example

uplot box -H -d, -t "Iris Boxplot" < iris.csv

Reading the plot

Each box is rendered using Unicode box-drawing characters across three character rows:

• Whiskers extend from the minimum to Q1 and from Q3 to the maximum, drawn as thin vertical lines (╷ and ╵).
• Box spans from Q1 to Q3, drawn with corner pieces (┌┐└┘) and horizontal fills.
• Median is marked with a vertical bar (┬ or ┴) inside the box.

The x-axis shows the numeric range, with tick marks at the minimum, midpoint, and maximum values across all displayed series. When multiple series are present, the axis range extends to cover all of them.

Command-specific options

The border style defaults to corners rather than solid, which gives box plots a cleaner appearance by removing the continuous top and bottom border lines.

Non-numeric values in columns are silently coerced to zero. If your CSV has a categorical column mixed with numeric columns (like the species column in iris.csv), the non-numeric column will not cause an error but its box will be collapsed at zero. Use cut to select only the columns you want to plot.

The x-axis range is automatically computed from the data. Use --xlim to override it when you want consistent axis ranges across multiple plots or when you want to zoom into a specific region of the data.