Save ipython notebook as script programmatically

Question

The excellent ipython notebook has a handy --script command line flag that automatically saves a copy of the notebook as a .py script file (removin

Answer 1

Oh. My mistake. nbconvert can handle conversions to script. So I can do something like this:

!ipython nbconvert --to python MyNB.ipynb

Of course, this line will get saved to the script, which means the script will try to re-save the notebook to itself every time it's executed. That's a bit circular, and I can imagine it could cause problems with some of my more outlandish hacks. Instead, we can ensure that it's only run from ipython by wrapping it as follows:

try :
    if(__IPYTHON__) :
        !ipython nbconvert --to python MyNB.ipynb
except NameError :
    pass

Note that the conversion process will automatically convert the ! syntax to something that is acceptable to plain python. This is apparently not the case with the --script conversion. So the extra-safe way to do this is

try :
    if(__IPYTHON__) :
        get_ipython().system(u'ipython nbconvert --to python MyNB.ipynb')
except NameError :
    pass