I’d like to be able to export the contents of some cells programmatically, but before doing so I’d like to check if the cell would run as a standalone python module/file.
Is there a way of quickly executing a cell via the API in a blank/fresh context to check if it would run by itself?
The manual version of this process for reference is to copy the contents of a cell into a new python file, then run it with python newfile.py and eliminate the NameErrors one by one.
The best I can think of is to mess with the globals() object. That's where all top-level names are stored. You might be able to do something like this (I haven't tested it):
# top of code, to get clean globals
from copy import copy
original_globals = copy(globals())
del original_globals["copy"]
... # misc code
# now you want to check if it would work standalone, so set globals to original state
new_globals = copy(globals())
for name in new_globals:
if name not in original_globals:
del globals()[name]
... # do something standalone
# reset global state
for name, value in new_globals.items():
globals()[name] = value
Not foolproof by any means (e.g. if you redefine a global like sum, but that's a bad idea generally anyway), but it should catch most what you're looking for. I would also look into implementing this feature as a context manager, so you could make it as simple as:
with restore_initial_global_state():
... # do something standalone