%matplotlib line magic causes SyntaxError in Python script

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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