ipython

pandas in the IPython Notebook

jiffyclub, , 1 Comment

I finally got around to playing a tiny bit with pandas today and was delighted when I saw its representation in the IPython notebook. Take a look in the PDF.

IPython detects a special _repr_html_ method on (in this case) the pandas DataFrame object and uses that for the output instead of the usual __str__ or __repr__ methods. Here _repr_html_ returns the contents of the DataFrame in an HTML table, which is also useful for posting to a blog:

Ant Bat Cat Dog
0 0 1 2 3
1 4 5 6 7
2 8 9 10 11
3 12 13 14 15
4 16 17 18 19

This is another great feature of the IPython notebook and I look forward to it popping up in more places!

pandas in the IPython Notebook

IPython HTML Notebook

jiffyclub, 4 Comments

Until recently I had never been a fan of IPython but with their HTML notebook they’ve finally won me over. What I like about this tool is that it makes it easy to go back and forth between interactive prototyping and a script. Being able to continuously edit and re-run code in an interactive session is a powerful tool.

The notebook also makes a great tutorial and demo tool. Here’s a PDF of my session developing a Python replacement for IDL’s GAUSSFIT function.

Installation

The IPython notebook requires a few extra packages but if you have a setup like me it’s easy to get everything installed:

brew install zeromq
pip install pyzmq
pip install tornado
pip install ipython

After doing this you may also want to locally install MathJax for JavaScript equation rendering:

from IPython.external.mathjax import install_mathjax
install_mathjax()

To launch the notebook from whatever directory you want to work in:

ipython notebook

This will launch the IPython notebook dashboard in your default browser, from which you can make new notebooks or resume working on existing ones.

See the docs for all you can do with the notebook, and enjoy!

IPython HTML Notebook