prevent plot from showing in jupyter notebook

How can I prevent a specific plot to be shown in Jupyter notebook? I have several plots in a notebook but I want a subset of them to be saved to a file and not shown on the notebook as this slows considerably.

A minimal working example for a Jupyter notebook is:

%matplotlib inline 
from numpy.random import randn
from matplotlib.pyplot import plot, figure
a=randn(3)
b=randn(3)
for i in range(10):
    fig=figure()
    plot(b)
    fname='s%03d.png'%i
    fig.savefig(fname)
    if(i%5==0):
        figure()
        plot(a)

As you can see I have two types of plots, a and b. I want a's to be plotted and shown and I don't want the b plots to be shown, I just want them them to be saved in a file. Hopefully this will speed things a bit and won't pollute my notebook with figures I don't need to see.

Thank you for your time

Perhaps just clear the axis, for example:

fig= plt.figure()
plt.plot(range(10))
fig.savefig("save_file_name.pdf")
plt.close()

will not plot the output in inline mode. I can't work out if is really clearing the data though.

I was able to prevent my figures from displaying by turning interactive mode off using the function

plt.ioff()

To prevent any output from a jupyter notebook cell you may start the cell with

%%capture

This might be usefull in cases all other methods shown here fail.

I'm a beginner though,off the inline mode when you don't want to see the output in your notebook by:

%matplotlib auto

or:

%matplotlib

to use it back:

%matplotlib inline

more better solution would be to use:

plt.ioff()

which says inline mode off.

hope it helps.

From IPython 6.0 on, there is another option to turn the inline output off (temporarily or persistently). This has been introduced in this pull request.

You would use the "agg" backend to not show any inline output.