How to Automatically Create Jupyter Notebooks - Python + Nbformat

In this quick tutorial, we're going to see how to programmatically create a Jupyter Notebook. At the end you will know how to convert markdown, CSV or JSON to Jupyter Notebook.

Generate Notebook with Nbformat

To create a new notebook automatically by nbformat we can use library nbformat. The library can be installed by:

pip install nbformat

To create new notebook we can use the following example:

import nbformat
from nbformat.v4 import new_notebook, new_markdown_cell, new_code_cell

nb = new_notebook()  # create a new empty notebook

# add a markdown cell
cell1 = new_markdown_cell('Markdown cell.')
nb['cells'].append(cell1)

# add a code cell
cell2 = new_code_cell('print("code cell.")')
nb['cells'].append(cell2)

# save the notebook to a file
with open('new_notebook.ipynb', 'w') as f:
	nbformat.write(nb, f)

Where:

• new_notebook() - create new notebook
• new_markdown_cell('Markdown cell.') - add new markdown cell
• new_code_cell('print("code cell.")') - add code cells

Notebook from markdown, CSV, JSON

We can use pandas to parse data stored as markdown, CSV JSON and create a new jupyter notebook. To do so we can:

• read the data with Pandas
• then iterate over the dataframe
• finally generate the notebook

Example is shown below:

import nbformat
from nbformat.v4 import new_notebook, new_markdown_cell, new_code_cell

nb = new_notebook()
name = '0_julia.ipynb'

for x, cat in enumerate(df.category.unique()):
	print(cat)
	cat_sum = cat_sum_img[cat_sum_img['category'] == cat]['category summary'].iloc[0]
	image = cat_sum_img[cat_sum_img['category'] == cat]['image'].iloc[0]
    
	if '\n' in cat_sum:
    	cat_sum = cat_sum.replace('\n', '\\n').replace('\t', '\\t')
    
	cell1 = new_markdown_cell(f'## {x}.' + cat_sum)
	nb['cells'].append(cell1)

	for i, row in df[df.category == cat].reset_index().iterrows():
   	 
    	description = row.description   
    	code = row.code2   

    	if '\"' in code:
        	# print(code)
        	code = code.replace('\\"', '"')
        	# print(code)
   	 
   	 
    	msg = '# ' + description + '\n' + code
    	cell2 = new_code_cell(msg)
    	nb['cells'].append(cell2)

with open(name, 'w') as f:
	nbformat.write(nb, f)

where data is:

Resources

• nbformat
• notedown
• ipyrmd