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Suppose I want use jupiter notebook/ipython as an development environment and copy everything to a python scripts afterwards. In ipython we have commands like 

In [1]: cd ..
/Users/myname/Desktop/software

In [2]: ls
  blah_blah_blah/

Suppose I finish my ipython notebook and want to copy everything (suppose I have 1000 lines and I could not edit them 1 by 1) to create my python script. Is it possible to enable my python script to understand such lines like "cd .." etc.

wjandrea
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user40780
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2 Answers2

4

Any method for running your IPython code using a standard Python interpreter is going to be a little complicated. For example, see this question, with one of the answers illustrating the call to IPython's 'magic' methods to do a shell command:

from IPython.terminal.embed import InteractiveShellEmbed

ipshell = InteractiveShellEmbed()
ipshell.dummy_mode = True
ipshell.magic("%timeit abs(-42)")

The much easier option would be to simply use the IPython interpreter to run your saved script. You need to make sure that each shell command is preceded by a %, as this indicates a 'magic' command. Should be a simple find-and-replace task, as I doubt you are using too many shell commands. If there are a lot of different shell commands to prefix with % you could also write a short script to do this work for you. You also need to ensure that your script has the extension .ipy.

script.ipy:

%cd ..
%ls
x = "My script!"
print(x)

To run script from terminal:

>>> ipython script.ipy
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Andrew Guy
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0

As said above, we can run ipython scripts using ipython from command line:

ipython my_script.ipy

However, magic cells are currently not working well. For instance, if you have the following script:

%%writefile hello.txt
this is a line
another line

print ('hello')

my_path = '/path/to/folder'
list_of_txt = !ls {my_path}/*.txt
print (list_of_txt)

It will run the initial cell magic %%writefile as if the whole file was a single cell. In order to avoid that, you have to use get_ipython().run_cell_magic ()

Since each ipython command needs a different function, I find it helpful to write ipython commands you want in a notebook, and then in the notebook's menu do File > "Save and Export Notebook As" > "Executable Script" (in jupyter lab, but probably something similar can be done in plain jupyter notebook). It will convert all the ipython-specific code using appropriate functions from the IPython library.

For example, if we copy and paste the previous script in different cells of a notebook and export it as a .py file, it gives us the following python code:

code written in exported script:

get_ipython().run_cell_magic('writefile', 'hello.txt', 'this is a line\nanother line\n')

my_path = '/path/to/folder'
list_of_txt  = get_ipython().getoutput('ls {my_path}/*.txt')
print (list_of_txt)

You can run the exported script directly using ipython from command line:

ipython my_exported_script.py

Or, inside an ipython session, using

%run my_exported_script.py

This works for IPython 1.x

Jau A
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