Removing cells, inputs, or outputs ================================== .. currentmodule:: nbconvert.preprocessors When converting Notebooks into other formats, it is possible to remove parts of a cell, or entire cells, using preprocessors. The notebook will remain unchanged, but the outputs will have certain pieces removed. Here are two primary ways to accomplish this. Removing pieces of cells using cell tags ---------------------------------------- The most straightforward way to control which pieces of cells are removed is to use **cell tags**. These are single-string snippets of metadata that are stored in each cells "tag" field. The ``TagRemovePreprocessor`` can be used to remove inputs, outputs, or entire cells. For example, here is a configuration that uses a different tag for removing each part of a cell with the HTMLExporter. In this case, we demonstrate using the nbconvert Python API. .. code-block:: python from traitlets.config import Config import nbformat as nbf from nbconvert.exporters import HTMLExporter from nbconvert.preprocessors import TagRemovePreprocessor # Setup config c = Config() # Configure tag removal - be sure to tag your cells to remove using the # words remove_cell to remove cells. You can also modify the code to use # a different tag word c.TagRemovePreprocessor.remove_cell_tags = ("remove_cell",) c.TagRemovePreprocessor.remove_all_outputs_tags = ("remove_output",) c.TagRemovePreprocessor.remove_input_tags = ("remove_input",) c.TagRemovePreprocessor.enabled = True # Configure and run out exporter c.HTMLExporter.preprocessors = ["nbconvert.preprocessors.TagRemovePreprocessor"] exporter = HTMLExporter(config=c) exporter.register_preprocessor(TagRemovePreprocessor(config=c), True) # Configure and run our exporter - returns a tuple - first element with html, # second with notebook metadata output = HTMLExporter(config=c).from_filename("your-notebook-file-path.ipynb") # Write to output html file with open("your-output-file-name.html", "w") as f: f.write(output[0]) This additional example demonstrates using the CLI to remove cells with a certain cell tag .. code-block:: sh jupyter nbconvert mynotebook.ipynb --TagRemovePreprocessor.enabled=True --TagRemovePreprocessor.remove_cell_tags remove_cell Removing cells using Regular Expressions on cell content -------------------------------------------------------- Sometimes you'd rather remove cells based on their _content_ rather than their tags. In this case, you can use the ``RegexRemovePreprocessor``. You initialize this preprocessor with a single ``patterns`` configuration, which is a list of strings. For each cell, this preprocessor checks whether the cell contents match any of the strings provided in ``patterns``. If the contents match any of the patterns, the cell is removed from the notebook. For example, execute the following command to convert a notebook to html and remove cells containing only whitespace: .. code-block:: bash jupyter nbconvert --RegexRemovePreprocessor.patterns="['\s*\Z']" mynotebook.ipynb The command line argument sets the list of patterns to ``'\s*\Z'`` which matches an arbitrary number of whitespace characters followed by the end of the string. See https://regex101.com/ for an interactive guide to regular expressions (make sure to select the python flavor). See https://docs.python.org/library/re.html for the official regular expression documentation in python.