Modern Python Projects Transcripts
Chapter: Writing code
Lecture: IPython
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IPython is probably the most popular REPL for Python. It's the same REPL that brands behind the Jupyter notebooks.
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So if you're using Jupyter notebooks, then you will feel at home. Once you install IPython with pip, you can started by typing. Well,
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I Python in your terminal, out of the box, We have syntax highlighting. We have automatic indentations.
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So when we start writing a for loop and we press enter, IPython will automatically detect that we want to insert four spaces.
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We get the tab completion. So, for example, when we want to import the function from some module,
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we can just type some letters and keep pressing tab to find the function that we're looking for and one really nice thing is a dynamic object
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Introspection. This is my single most favorite feature of IPython. You no longer need to search for documentation of a function or a module.
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You just append the question mark to the name of the function, and IPython will show you the docstring of that object.
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And if you want to see the complete source code, just use double question marks instead, it won't work in this case,
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because chdir is a function that comes from CPython. But if you're using some external pip modules, then it will work. Let's try to,
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import the function from IPython itself and see it. As you can see here we are importing some module from IPython genitals.
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And then if we use double question mark, we can see the whole source code of this module.
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Another cool thing is that you can run shell functions directly from IPython by prepending
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your functions with the exclamation mark, so we can list the content of the current directory We can create a new file,
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and we can even start vim from IPython. There are some helper functions called magic commands that you can use for some common things,
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like measuring the execution time of some code, running a Python script without living the Python terminal and so on. One of them is, for example,
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run that you can use to run, any Python file in the current I Python session So let's try to execute the file that we just created and it's working.
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There are many more things that you can do if IPython. If you want to learn more,
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I actually have a presentation on IPython that I gave at some conferences.
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It's a 45 minute long, fast paced talk where I go through various features of
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IPython. I will put a link to this presentation in the resource page of the course.