How to call module written with argparse in iPython notebook

Question

I am trying to pass BioPython sequences to Ilya Stepanov\'s implementation of Ukkonen\'s suffix tree algorithm in iPython\'s notebook environment. I am stumbling on the argp

Answer 1

I've had a similar problem before, but using optparse instead of argparse.

You don't need to change anything in the original script, just assign a new list to sys.argv like so:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    from Bio import SeqIO
    path = '/path/to/sequences.txt'
    sequences = [str(record.seq) for record in  SeqIO.parse(path, 'fasta')]
    sys.argv = ['-f'] + sequences
    main()

Answer 2

If you don't want to change any of the arguments and working mechanisms from the original argparse function you have written or copied.

To let the program work then there is a simple solution that works most of the time.

You could just install jupyter-argparser using the below command:

pip install jupyter_argparser

The codes work without any changes thanks to the maintainer of the package.

Answer 3

An alternative to use argparse in Ipython notebooks is passing a string to:

args = parser.parse_args() (line 303 from the git repo you referenced.)

Would be something like:

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
        description='Searching longest common substring. '
                    'Uses Ukkonen\'s suffix tree algorithm and generalized suffix tree. '
                    'Written by Ilya Stepanov (c) 2013')

parser.add_argument(
        'strings',
        metavar='STRING',
        nargs='*',
        help='String for searching',
    )

parser.add_argument(
        '-f',
        '--file',
        help='Path for input file. First line should contain number of lines to search in'
    )

and

args = parser.parse_args("AAA --file /path/to/sequences.txt".split())

Edit: It works