Sweave for python

I have written a Python implementation of Sweave called Pweave that implements basic functionality and some options of Sweave for Python code embedded in reST or Latex document. You can get it here: http://mpastell.com/pweave and see the original blog post here: http://mpastell.com/2010/03/03/pweave-sweave-for-python/

Some suggestions:

1. I have been using Pweave for several years now, and it is very similar to Sweave. Highly recommended.
2. The most popular tool for embedded reports in python at this stage is Jupyter notebooks, which allow you to embed markdown, and they are quite useful although I personally still like writing things in LaTeX...
3. You can also have a look at PyLit, which is intended for literate programming with Python, but not as well maintained as some of the alternatives.
4. Sphinx is great for documenting with python, and can output LaTex.
5. Here's a list of tools for literate programming. Some of these work with any programming language.

You might consider noweb, which is language independent and is the basis for Sweave. I've used it for Python and it works well.

http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb/

I've restructured Matti's Pweave a bit, so that it is possible to define arbitrary "chunk-processors" as plugin-modules. This makes it easy to extend for several chunk-based text-preprocessing applications. The restructured version is available at https://bitbucket.org/edgimar/pweave/src. As an example, you could write the following LaTeX-Pweave document (notice the "processor name" in this example is specified with the name 'mplfig'):

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\title{Test document}
\maketitle

Don't miss the great information in Figure \ref{myfig}!


<<p=mplfig, label=myfig, caption = "Figure caption...">>=
import sys
import pylab as pl

pl.plot([1,2,3,4,5],['2,4,6,8,10'], 'b.', markersize=15)
pl.axis('scaled')
pl.axis([-3,3, -3,3]) # [xmin,xmax, ymin,ymax]
@

\end{document}

You could try SageTeX which implements Sweave-Like functionality for the SAGE mathematics platform. I haven't played around with it as much as I would like to, but SAGE is basically a python shell and evaluates python as it's native language.

I have also thought about the same thing many times. After reading your questions and looking into your link I made small modifications to the custom python Sweave driver, that you link to. I modified it to also keep the source code and produce the output as well the same way that Sweave does for R.

I posted the modified version and an example here: http://mpastell.com/2010/02/09/python-in-sweave-document/

Granted, it is not optimal but I'm quite happy with the output and I like the ability to include both R and Python in the same document.

Edit about PyLit:

I also like PyLit and contrary to my original answer you can catch ouput with it as well, although it not as elegant as Sweave! Here is a small example how to do it:

import sys

# Catch PyLit output

a = range(3)
sys.stdout = open('output.txt', 'w')
print a
sys.stdout = sys.__stdout__

# .. include:: output.txt

Well, with reticulate which is a recent best implementation of a Python interface in R you could continue using Sweave and call Python inline using the R interpreter. For example this now works in a .Rnw or .Rmd markdown file.

```{r example, include=FALSE}
library(reticulate)
use_python("./dir/python")
```

```{python}
import pandas
data = pandas.read_csv("./data.csv")
print(data.head())
```

I think that Jupyter-book may do what you want.