Remove output from IPython notebook from the command line (dev version 1.0)

remove_output.py

"""
Usage: python remove_output.py notebook.ipynb
Modified from remove_output by Minrk
Modified from remove_output by mathematicalmichael
"""
import sys
import io
import os
from nbformat import read, write, NO_CONVERT


def remove_outputs(nb):
    """remove the outputs from a notebook"""
    cell_rm = []
    for cell in nb.cells:
        cell.outputs = []
    nb.metadata.history = []


if __name__ == '__main__':
    fname = sys.argv[1]
    with io.open(fname, 'r') as f:
        nb = read(f, NO_CONVERT)
    remove_outputs(nb)
    base, ext = os.path.splitext(fname)
    new_ipynb = "%s_removed%s" % (base, ext)
    with io.open(new_ipynb, 'w', encoding='utf8') as f:
        write(nb, f, NO_CONVERT)
    print("wrote %s"% new_ipynb)

THanks for sharing this solution. Unfortunately it did not work for me, here is the error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 467852: character maps to

I was able to recover my 75 MB .ipynb file though. I made the mistake of printing a gigantic list to the notebook output. I was able to open the .ipynb file with a simple text editor and delete the gigantic list output and this dropped the file size to 3 MB. Now it works.

@emskiphoto seems like the problem is you've got some unhandled character. this snippet seems to work in general but yeah, in no way does it have robust error-handling =/
sorry it didn't work for you, but it sounds like you did the equivalent thing manually. automation like this is really only useful when the problem is persistent. I for one, haven't used it since publication because the underlying problem bloating my notebooks was fixed.