Ignore IPython magic in python

Question

What is the best way to ignore IPython magic when running scripts using the python interpreter?

I often include IPython magic in my script files because it work with the code interactively. For example, with the autoreload magic, I don't have to keep reload-ing the modules after I make some changes and fix bugs:

%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2

However, when I try to run this script using a usual python interpreter, I get an error:

  File "<string>", line 1
    %load_ext autoreload
    ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Wrapping IPython magic inside an if statement does not work, because incorrect syntax is detected before the file is actually ran.

---

So what is the best way to get python to ignore IPython magic?

It's annoying to have to change your scripts whenever you want to run then in python, pdb, sphinx, etc.

Answer 1

For all tools that can read from standard input you could use grep to remove any magic lines and pipe the result into python:

grep -v '^%' magicscript.ipy | python

Works well as a bash alias:

alias pynomagic='( grep -v "^%" | python ) < '
pynomagic magicscript.ipy

Tools like pdb that only accept filenames could be called like this (bash again):

pdb <(grep -v '^%' magicscript.ipy)