How to programmatically create a markdown cell?

JupyterLab
,
1

I am using this function to create a preformatted html div in a new cell:

def new_section(title='New section'):
    style = "text-align:center;background:#c2d3ef;padding:16px;color:#ffffff;font-size:2em;width:98%"
    div = f'<div style="{style}">{title}</div>'
    return get_ipython().set_next_input(div, replace=True)

I call the function new_section() in a new cell and after execution, the html replaces the call.
This is only a partial solution to what I want to accomplish, which is to create that cell with a cell_type of ‘markdown’ so that I do not have to manually change the cell type before running it to render the html.
Is that possible?
Thanks for you help.

2

The line between client and kernel is intentionally fairly austere: the linked code works today in e.g. JupyterLab and the IPython terminal app… but probably not nbconvert, for example. I would also probably not expect this to be extended in the future.

One approach to bridging the two is a client-specific tool such as ipylab: it can run any jupyterlab command… but there might not be one for “new markdown cell”.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your prompt response!
It seems to me that the outcome of get_ipython().set_next_input is to create a new CODE cell by default.
How difficult would it be to amend the set_next_input method to include a cell_type parameter, which would be ‘code_cell’ by default, along with markdown_cell and raw_cell as the other valid cell types?

4

put more simply: no. the kernel doesn’t know about being in a notebook.

1 Like