[FIXED] Access other Cell Contents within cell (Colab)

Issue

Good Afternoon from Germany, everybody!

Google Colab and I seem to have divergent opinions on what is possible or not... I just want a way to access the contents of all other cells from within a cell.

My use case is, that I want to POST the contents of a current Colab Notebook to an external server for grading with minimal user interaction (just running the cell).

So my question is: Is there a way to access the code cells of a Colab NB programmatically?

I saw this answer for Jupyter NB, but it does not work in Google Colab as the Jupyter JS-Variable is not available. The variable google.colab seems to not provide the same functionality, or am I missing something?

Google Colab seems to sandbox each cell in its one iframe, so I cannot query the contents of other cells via JS:

    %%js
    document.getElementsByClassName('cell')

When run in a cell this just leads to an empty HTMLCollection, when run in the Developer Tools of my browser I get the correct results.

Am I missing something here? Is there a way to escape the sandbox or access the current NB contents within a Python cell?

Thanks in Advance for your help!

Solution

Sure, here's a complete example: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1mXuyMsPEXFU4ik9EGLBiWUuNfztf7J6_

The key bit is this:

# Obtain the notebook JSON as a string
from google.colab import _message
notebook_json_string = _message.blocking_request('get_ipynb', request='', timeout_sec=5)

Reproducing the executed example from the notebook:

Answered By - Bob Smith