%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.