Bash/Zsh functions for viewing/grepping only the input code of an IPython notebook and for clearing output cells.

ipython_nb_shell.sh

# Two very basic functions for searching just the input code of an IPython notebook
# Written because I often want to search notebooks for snippets but the giant output
# of embedded encoded images makes it difficult.

# Ipython's nbconvert can be used to extract just the input, but this requires 
# writing to a separate file and can be quite slow when used with large notebooks.
# Additionally, find/xargs can be used with igrep when the name of the notebook isn't known.

# icat could be used to convert an IPython notebook to a standard python file if 
# the notebook does not contain whole-cell magics.

# Michelle L. Gill, 2014/06/21

# Both functions require jq for parsing the IPython notebook json: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/
# icat also optionally uses pygments, which is an IPython dependency http://pygments.org/docs/cmdline/
function icat {
	jq '.worksheets[].cells[] | select(.cell_type=="code") | .input[]' $1 \
	| sed 's/^"//g;s/"$//g;s/\\n$//g;s/\\"/"/g;s/\\\\/\\/g' \
	| pygmentize -l python
}

# File name is specified last and all other arguments are assumed to belong to grep
# This approximates grep's standard behavior
# The slicing of $argv may not work in Bash. Honestly, you should be using zsh though.
function igrep {
	jq '.worksheets[].cells[] | select(.cell_type=="code") | .input[]' $argv[-1] \
	| sed 's/^"//g;s/"$//g;s/\\n$//g;s/\\"/"/g;s/\\\\/\\/g' \
	| grep $argv[1,-2] 
}

# This simple function will clear the output cells in a notebook. This can then be 
# redirected into a new file from the command line
function clearoutput {
	jq '. | .worksheets[].cells[].outputs=[] ' $1
}

Thank you for sharing this technique!

I often want to know "what the heck notebook did I figure out how to do such-and-such in?" So I wrote a little wrapper script that uses mdfind (to access the OSX spotlight database) to find all the .ipynb files, then searches their code (using your extractor) for a given pattern, and displaying matches.

https://gist.github.com/jbarratt/fa1d3473048e5f856aeb

Hello! Sorry for my slow reply--I've been in the process of moving and starting a new job and somehow I missed this post. Glad this was useful and your modifications are really nice!