Clear all except for a few specific variables in IPython

Question

I'm aware of the %reset and %reset_selective commands in IPython. However, let's say you have many variables and you want to clear all variables except x, y, z. Is there a concise way to accomplish this? Say a %reset_all_except x,y,z?

Answer 1

%reset_selective accepts RegEx.
If you have variables named as: glob_x, glob_y, glob_z which you don't want to reset, you can use: %reset_selective -f ^(?!glob_).*$

Answer 2

this is a collective answer based off a ton of similar questions:

capture default variables in the system AND the name of the list that will save the variables to be preserved (should be your very first lines of code):

save_list = dir()
save_list.append('save_list') #thanks @V.Foy!

add other variables you want to save to the list before the "clear variables" command is used:

save_list.append(*your_variable_to_be_saved*)

finally, clear all variables (except default and saved) with:

for name in dir():
    if name not in save_list:
        del globals()[name]

for name in dir():
    if name not in save_list:
        del locals()[name]

this will clear all variables except the default and those you choose to save. whenever i did that without saving default variables, it cleared those too and i had to restart kernel to get them back.