You can usually easily and safely do copy-pasting with IPython, through the commands %cpaste (manually end code with --) and %paste (execute code immediately). This is very handy for testing code that you copy from web pages, for instance, or from your editor: these commands even strip leading prompts (like In[1] and ...) for you.
IPython also has a %run command that runs a program and leaves you in a Python shell with all the variables that were defined in the program, so that you can play with them.
In order to get help on these functions: %cpaste?, etc.