In Google's Colab notebook, How do I call a function from a Python file?

Question

From a Colab notebook, I would like to call a python function that I wrote in a separate python file. How do I do that?

Answer 1

Edit: If you would like to import a local module, you'll want to edit your sys.path to point to that new directory. Here's an example notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/notebook#fileId=1PtYW0hZit-B9y4PL978kV2ppJJPhjQua

Original reply: Sure, here's an example notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/notebook#fileId=1KBrq8aAiy8vYIIUiTb5UHG9GKOdEMF3n

There are two cells: the first defines a .py file with a function to be imported.

%%writefile example.py
def f():
  print 'This is a function defined in a Python source file.'

The second cell uses execfile to evaluate that .py file in the notebook's Python interpreter.

# Bring the file into the local Python environment.
execfile('example.py')

# Call the function defined in the file.
f()