Remove output from IPython notebook from the command line (dev version 1.0)

remove_output.py

"""
Usage: python remove_output.py notebook.ipynb [ > without_output.ipynb ]
Modified from remove_output by Minrk

"""
import sys
import io
import os
from IPython.nbformat.current import read, write


def remove_outputs(nb):
    """remove the outputs from a notebook"""
    for ws in nb.worksheets:
        for cell in ws.cells:
            if cell.cell_type == 'code':
                cell.outputs = []

if __name__ == '__main__':
    fname = sys.argv[1]
    with io.open(fname, 'r') as f:
        nb = read(f, 'json')
    remove_outputs(nb)
    base, ext = os.path.splitext(fname)
    new_ipynb = "%s_removed%s" % (base, ext)
    with io.open(new_ipynb, 'w', encoding='utf8') as f:
        write(nb, f, 'json')
    print "wrote %s" % new_ipynb

Thank! This helped me to open notebook.ipynb with 1,000,000 lines of output!

Use clean_ipynb, which not only clears notebook output but can also clean the code.

Install by pip install clean_ipynb

Run by clean_ipynb hello.ipynb

This is best.

The last line is Python2 specific. It could be made Python2/3 compatible by using

from __future__ import print_function
# existing code
print("wrote %s" % new_ipynb)

Hey!
Thanks for this, it put me on the right track. In my case, history was being clogged up with 10's to 100's of MBs for a file that is supposed to be under 50KB. I removed history and all cell outputs and found the file to be back to its correct size.

The nuclear option....

Here's my update for Python 3:
https://gist.github.com/mathematicalmichael/a206b2a21de0bf88a5703e8700403019

this worked for me a few months back, but now I get the following error: UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81 in position 1843494: character maps to

error is thrown for nb =read(f, 'json')

I love it..
thank you dude

I wasn't able to get this version or @mathematicalmichael version to work due to errors.

I was able to recover my 75 MB .ipynb file that was too large to load in Jupyter notebook on Chrome. I made the mistake of printing a gigantic list to the notebook output and saving the .ipynb. The solution was to open the .ipynb file with a simple text editor and delete the gigantic list output and this dropped the file size to 3 MB. Now it works.