Is there a way of getting the inset axes by "asking" the axes it is embedded in?

Question

I have several subplots, axs, some of them with embedded inset axes. I would like to get the data plotted in the insets by iterating over the main axes. Let's consider this minimal reproducible example:

fig, axs = plt.subplots(1, 3)
x = np.array([0,1,2])
for i, ax in enumerate(axs):
    if i != 1:
        ins = ax.inset_axes([.5,.5,.4,.4])
        ins.plot(x, i*x)
plt.show()

Is there a way of doing something like

data = []
for ax in axs:
    if ax.has_inset():       # "asking" if ax has embedded inset
        ins = ax.get_inset() # getting the inset from ax
        line = ins.get_lines()[0]
        dat = line.get_xydata()
        data.append(dat)
print(data)
# [array([[0., 0.],
#         [1., 0.],
#         [2., 0.]]),
#  array([[0., 0.],
#         [1., 2.],
#         [2., 4.]])]

Answer 1

You could use get_children and a filter to retrieve the insets:

from matplotlib.axes import Axes

def get_insets(ax):
    return [c for c in ax.get_children()
            if isinstance(c, Axes)]

for ax in fig.axes:
    print(get_insets(ax))

Output:

[<Axes:label='inset_axes'>]
[]
[<Axes:label='inset_axes'>]

For your particular example:

data = []
for ax in fig.axes:
    for ins in get_insets(ax):
        line = ins.get_lines()[0]
        dat = line.get_xydata()
        data.append(dat)

Output:

[array([[0., 0.],
        [1., 0.],
        [2., 0.]]),
 array([[0., 0.],
        [1., 2.],
        [2., 4.]])]