I want to do something like the following:
In[1]: name = 'long_name_to_type_every_now_and_then.py' In[2]: %run name but this actually tries to run 'name.py', which is not what I want to do.
Is there a general way to turn variables into strings?
Something like the following:
In[3]: %run %name% IPython expands variables with $name, bash-style. This is true for all magics, not just %run.
So you would do:
In [1]: filename = "myscript.py" In [2]: %run $filename ['myscript.py'] myscript.py contains:
import sys print(sys.argv) Via Python's fancy string formatting, you can even put expressions inside {}:
In [3]: args = ["arg1", "arg2"] In [4]: %run $filename {args[0]} {args[1][-2:]} ['myscript.py', 'arg1', 'g2'] 
%%html cell magic and it didn't work. Is there a different syntax for cell magics as opposed to line magics?
magics opt out of this expansion, time, timeit, debug and prun. github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/11516
%run "my_script.py" {' '.join(map(str, my_arguments_list))} Note that you'll have to retransform the strings to whatever you need on the script's side.Use get_ipython() to get a reference to the current InteractiveShell, then call the magic() method:
In [1]: ipy = get_ipython() In [2]: ipy.magic("run foo.py") ERROR: File `u'foo.py'` not found. Edit See minrk's answer — that's a much better way to do it.
In case there might be space in argument, e.g. filename, it is better to use this:
%run "$filename" It seems this is impossible with the built-in %run magic function. Your question led me down a rabbit hole, though, and I wanted to see how easy it would be to do something similar. At the end, it seems somewhat pointless to go to all this effort to create another magic function that just uses execfile(). Maybe this will be of some use to someone, somewhere.
# custom_magics.py from IPython.core.magic import register_line_magic, magics_class, line_magic, Magics @magics_class class StatefulMagics(Magics): def __init__(self, shell, data): super(StatefulMagics, self).__init__(shell) self.namespace = data @line_magic def my_run(self, line): if line[0] != "%": return "Not a variable in namespace" else: filename = self.namespace[line[1:]].split('.')[0] filename += ".py" execfile(filename) return line class Macro(object): def __init__(self, name, value): self.name = name self._value = value ip = get_ipython() magics = StatefulMagics(ip, {name: value}) ip.register_magics(magics) def value(self): return self._value def __repr__(self): return self.name Using this pair of classes, (and given a python script tester.py) it's possible to create and use a "macro" variable with the newly created "my_run" magic function like so:
In [1]: from custom_magics import Macro In [2]: Macro("somename", "tester.py") Out[2]: somename In [3]: %my_run %somename I'm the test file and I'm running! Out[3]: u'%somename' Yes, this is a huge and probably wasteful hack. In that vein, I wonder if there's a way to have the name bound to the Macro object be used as the macro's actual name. Will look into that.
If by 'variable' you mean a variable available in the user namespace, then I'd suggest to use get_ipython().ev(varname) (docs) to get your variable in your function:
from __future__ import print_function import argparse import shlex from IPython import get_ipython from IPython.core.magic import register_cell_magic @register_cell_magic def magical(line, cell): parser = argparse.ArgumentParser() parser.add_argument("varname") # using shlex to split the line in a sys.argv-like format args = parser.parse_args(shlex.split(line)) ipython = get_ipython() v = ipython.ev(args.varname) # do whatever you want here print(v) This template above served me well - I used it to make a jinja2 cell magic that also prints to file whenever the cell is run.
get_ipython().ev(...), very useful!More generally, but lacking pretty formatting:
ipy = get_ipython() ipy.run_cell_magic("spark", "", f""" from_dt = "{start_date}" to_dt = "{end_date}" """) effectively runs under a %%spark magic. For single % line magic:
ipy = get_ipython() ipy.run_line_magic("sql", "", f"SELECT * FROM {table_name}") 
$ python file args, so I guess It's not possible.