Sending parameters to a Jupyter Notebook cell using click

Using libraries such as click and optparse we can send parameters to Python scripts when we run them from the command line. For example, passing a parameter called count with a value of 2 to a script called hello.py:

hello.py --count=2

How can I replicate this functionality in a cell of a Jupyter notebook? I like to run the same code in the notebook so that I can easily copy it to a stand alone script. Using sys.argv to pass parameters to the main function seemed one way to go and works with optparse:

from optparse import OptionParser
import sys


def main():
    parser = OptionParser()
    parser.add_option('-f', '--fake',
                    default='False',
                help='Fake data')
    (options,args) = parser.parse_args()
    print('options:{} args: {}'.format(options, args))
    if options.fake:
        print('Fake detected')

def test_args():

    print('hello')

if __name__ == '__main__':

    sys.argv = ['--fake', 'True' '--help']
    main()

output:

options:{'fake': 'False'}
args: ['True--help']

Fake detected

Click seems to be flavor of the month, but I kept on getting a screen full of errors when I tried to run click through a Jupyter notebook cell. If we consider the Click example code:

import click

@click.command()
@click.option('--count', default=1, help='Number of greetings.')
@click.option('--name', prompt='Your name',
            help='The person to greet.')
def hello(count, name):
    """Simple program that greets NAME for a total of COUNT times."""
    for x in range(count):
        click.echo('Hello %s!' % name)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    hello()

If this file is called hello.py, then running from a command line:

hello.py 'Max' --count=3

Gives this output:

Hello Max!

Hello Max!

Hello Max!

But using the same sys.argv trick that works with optparse produces a screen full of errors when the same code is run from a Jupyter notebook cell. The solution is to put the %%python magic at the start of the cell:

%%python

import sys
import click

@click.command()
@click.option('--count', default=1, help='Number of greetings.')
@click.option('--name', prompt='Your name',
            help='The person to greet.')
def hello(count, name):
    """Simple program that greets NAME for a total of COUNT times."""
    for x in range(count):
        click.echo('Hello %s!' % name)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # first element is the script name, use empty string instead
    sys.argv = ['', '--name', 'Max', '--count', '3']
    hello()

A small tip, but one which cost me an hour or two of pondering. Finally I asked the hive mind of Stackoverflow. Please see this stackoverflow solution.