Generating an example dataset#

In case you don’t have an entire experiment’s worth of NWB files, you can generate an example dataset by running:

nwb2bids tutorial ephys dataset

Tip

Lost in the CLI? Can’t remember the exact phrase to type when navigating through the command groups? No worries!

Simply add the --help to any command to see detailed descriptions, expected inputs, and optional flags.

You can also see a layout of the command structure by calling each level at a time, for example nwb2bids, nwb2bids tutorial, and so on.

Try it out on nwb2bids tutorial to see all the types of tutorial data we can generate for you.

import nwb2bids

tutorial_directory = nwb2bids.testing.generate_ephys_tutorial(
    mode="dataset"
)

Tip

Lost in the Python library? Can’t remember the exact inputs to pass to an imported function? No worries!

Simply add the ? at the end of any module or function to see a detailed description of imports or expected inputs. Try it out on nwb2bids? to see the library’s welcome message.

The nwb2bids library is also designed for easy auto-completion in interactive environments like IPython or Jupyter notebooks; try it out on by hitting your tab button after typing nwb2bids.testing. to see all the functions exposed to that submodule.

Now we should have a directory that looks something like:

ecephys_tutorial_dataset/
├── ecephys_session_3.nwb
├── DO_NOT_CONVERT.nwb
└── some_sessions/
    ├── ecephys_session_1.nwb
    └── ecephys_session_1.nwb

Note

Don’t like overwhelming your home directory with lots of small files?

You can control where tutorial data is generated by using the --output-directory flag (or -o for short):

nwb2bids tutorial ephys file --output-directory path/to/some/directory

You can control where tutorial data is generated by using the output_directory keyword argument:

import nwb2bids

tutorial_directory = nwb2bids.testing.generate_ephys_tutorial(
    mode="file",
    output_directory=path_to_some_directory,
)

Other modalities#

You can also generate example NWB files for other modalities, such as icephys!

nwb2bids tutorial ephys dataset --modality icephys

import nwb2bids

tutorial_file = nwb2bids.testing.generate_ephys_tutorial(mode="dataset", modality="icephys")