Using Jupyter Notebooks in Visual Studio Code

jupyter_notebook_vs_code

Skill - Using Jupyter Notebooks in Visual Studio Code

Skills Required

Please make sure to have all the skills mentioned above to understand and execute the code mentioned below. Go through the above skills if necessary for reference or revision

In this post we are going to learn about how to use jupyter notebooks and add jupyter notebook features to python files in Visual Studio Code

jupyter_notebook_in_vs_code

Why the Jupyter Notebooks approach

Jupyter notebooks is the way to go approach for experimenting and debugging with python code or execute code in small parts while developing it.
Each part of a code is called a cell in a Jupyter notebook
Jupyter notebooks can also be used to graphically visualize the variables using the variable explorer.
One more use case of jupyter notebooks is that you can load data into variables once, and then play with them as many times as you wish by changing the code.
This is particularly useful if you load huge data into your variables

Add Jupyter notebook features to existing python code

jupyter_notebook_py_file

As shown in the image above, just add # %% in the line above your code to make it a jupyter notebook cell
The cell controls like Run Cell, Run Above will automatically displayed by Visual Studio Code
Upon running the cells in python file, we will get to see output in the right-side output pane. An example image is shown below

Variable Explorer to examine the variables graphically

Once the code cells are executed, the variables will be persisted
These can be seen graphically using the variable explorer button as shown in the below image
Variable Explorer is very handy if you want to examine the variables in the middle of complete code execution, just like debugging

Using jupyter notebooks in Visual Studio Code

Jupyter Notebooks are saved with .ipynb extension
To create a new ipynb file, open command pallete using Ctrl+Shift+P and select the command Create New Blank Jupyter Notebook
The cell user interface controls of ipynb file are shown in the below image
Even plotting outputs are displayed in the cell output section. An example cell output with plots can be seen in the image below