How to have matplotlib animation of message?

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Hi, I'm completely new to both ROS and not that good at programming generally so this will probably have an easy solution. But how do you use matplotlib to visualize something that happens inside the callback function? You can't put the lines inside callback function since it will error and say "main thread is not in main loop".

The code I have is below, I want to visualize the scan ranges from a lidar with matplotlib. How do I get a continually updating figure for the scan ranges?

#! /usr/bin/env python
   import rospy
   import numpy as np
   import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
   import matplotlib.animation as animation
   import random
   from sensor_msgs.msg import LaserScan

   x = np.linspace(0, 2* np.pi, 100)
   y=np.random.random_integers(1, 100, 100)

   plt.ion()
   fig = plt.figure()
   ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
   line1, = ax.plot(x, y, 'b-')
   def callback(scan):
       distance_list = scan.ranges
       print(distance_list)
       print("scan angle min", scan.angle_min)
       print("scan angle incr", scan.angle_increment)
       print("scan angle max", scan.angle_max)
       line1.set_ydata(distance_list)
       fig.canvas.draw()

   rospy.init_node('laser_subscriber')
   sub = rospy.Subscriber('\scan', LaserScan, callback)

   rospy.spin()