programmatically add cells to an ipython notebook for report generation

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There’s a Notebook gist by Fernando Perez here that demonstrates how to programmatically create new cells. Note that you can also pass metadata in, so if you’re generating a report and want to turn the notebook into a slideshow, you can easily indicate whether the cell should be a slide, sub-slide, fragment, etc.

You can add any kind of cell, so what you want is straightforward now (though it probably wasn’t when the question was asked!). E.g., something like this (untested code) should work:

from IPython.nbformat import current as nbf

nb = nbf.new_notebook()

cells = []

for var in my_list:
    # Assume make_image() saves an image to file and returns the filename
    image_file = make_image(var)
    text = "Variable: %s\n![image](%s)" % (var, image_file)
    cell = nbf.new_text_cell('markdown', text)
    cells.append(cell)

nb['worksheets'].append(nbf.new_worksheet(cells=cells))

with open('my_notebook.ipynb', 'w') as f:
        nbf.write(nb, f, 'ipynb')

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