FAQ#
What is a magic?#
One may be unfamiliar with the commands prefixed with % used in this instruction. Here is a detailed description of this command and its usage.
Definition of Jupyter Magic#
Magics are specific to and provided by the IPython kernel. Some common usage of magic functions are: running external code files, timing code execution, and loading IPython Extensions.
Suppose execute.py is a python code file
%run execute.py
%timeit L = [n ** 2 for n in range(1000)] (Timing executions -- will return 1000 loops, best of 3: 325 µs per loop)
In our code above, we use %load_ext to load an IPython extension by its module name, sql, and then directly use the extension by using %sql.
load an IPython extension by its module name.
%load_ext sql
Line Magic VS Cell Magic#
Line magics, which are denoted by a single % prefix and operate on a single line of input, and cell magics, which are denoted by a double %% prefix and operate on multiple lines of input.
For example, for the code above, %sql is a line magic, and %%sql is a code magic.