matplotlib inline syntax error

Question

I'm testing a python program, which contains calling for IPython. But I got errors in the following code: If I use

%matplotlib inline

I got a syntax error at the "%" symbol. I found a solution to this problem using:

from IPython import get_ipython
get_ipython().run_line_magic('matplotlib', 'inline')

I got error saying:

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'run_line_magic'

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 and running the code via command line. How can I fix this ?

Solution

This %matplotlib magic is used to display graphs (of matplotlib.pyplot objects). This needs UI to display. So cannot be display on command prompt.

According to IPython documentation,

If the %matplotlib magic is called without an argument, the output of a plotting command is displayed using the default matplotlib backend in a separate window. Alternatively, the backend can be explicitly requested using, for example:

%matplotlib gtk

A particularly interesting backend, provided by IPython, is the inline backend. This is available only for the Jupyter Notebook and the Jupyter QtConsole. It can be invoked as follows:

%matplotlib inline

Simple solution would be to replace %matplotlib inline with %matplotlib and run it using ipython.

Alternatively, what you could do is download jupyter notebook and run that code there.

Or as @tihom said in comments, you could comment or remove that line and run the code but this wouldn't display the graphs and other things.