%matplotlib line magic causes SyntaxError in Python script

I try to run the following codes on Spyder (Python 2.7.11):

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

%matplotlib inline

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.cm as cm

import tensorflow as tf

# settings
LEARNING_RATE = 1e-4
# set to 20000 on local environment to get 0.99 accuracy
TRAINING_ITERATIONS = 2000        

DROPOUT = 0.5
BATCH_SIZE = 50

# set to 0 to train on all available data
VALIDATION_SIZE = 2000

# image number to output
IMAGE_TO_DISPLAY = 10

But I got this error:

line 10
    %matplotlib inline
    ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax.

I appreciate if anybody gives me an explanation.

P.S. the code is from Kaggle competition project: Digit Recognizer

Line magics are only supported by the IPython command line. They cannot simply be used inside a script, because %something is not correct Python syntax.

If you want to do this from a script you have to get access to the IPython API and then call the run_line_magic function.

Instead of %matplotlib inline, you will have to do something like this in your script:

from IPython import get_ipython
get_ipython().run_line_magic('matplotlib', 'inline')

A similar approach is described in this answer, but it uses the deprecated magic function.

Note that the script still needs to run in IPython. Under vanilla Python the get_ipython function returns None and get_ipython().run_line_magic will raise an AttributeError.

Because line magics are only supported by the IPython command line not by Python cl, use: 'exec(%matplotlib inline)' instead of %matplotlib inline

Silvia07

The syntax '%' in %matplotlib inline is recognized by iPython (where it is set up to handle the magic methods), but not Python itself, which gives a SyntaxError. Here is given one solution.

If you include the following code at the top of your script, matplotlib will run inline when in an IPython environment (like jupyter, hydrogen atom plugin...), and it will still work if you launch the script directly via command line (matplotlib won't run inline, and the charts will open in a pop-ups as usual).

from IPython import get_ipython
ipy = get_ipython()
if ipy is not None:
    ipy.run_line_magic('matplotlib', 'inline')

There are several reasons as to why this wouldn't work.

It is possible that matplotlib is not properly installed. have you tried running:

conda install matplotlib

If that doesn't work, look at your %PATH% environment variable, does it contain your libraries and python paths?