Ipython Notebook: programmatically read and execute cells

I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly. Would you like to be able to manipulate the exact same notebook that you are currently working in? While this may be possible, it honestly sounds like a recipe for disaster because it will most likely leave your currently running notebook in an undefined state (or at the very least it would make it hard to follow what's going on).

A cleaner solution may be to programmatically generate a separate notebook in which you include precisely the code cells you need for your use case, and then execute it. (Alternatively, you can have a "template" .ipynb file with dummy code cells which you then programmatically replace with the actual code that you want to run).

I needed to do a similar thing recently and have written up a detailed example which shows how to do this. It programmatically generates a new notebook, adds a few markdown and code cells (which in this case produce a sine wave plot where the frequency is injected on-the-fly), then executes this notebook and saves the result for further postprocessing.

I hope this helps. Let me know if I completely misunderstood what you are trying to do.

hi the exact answer to your question is :

import io
from IPython.nbformat import current

with io.open("Name_of_your_notebook.ipynb") as f:
nb = current.read(f, 'json')

ip = get_ipython()

for cell in nb.worksheets[0].cells:
  if cell.cell_type != 'code':
    continue
  if cell.prompt_number==4186:
    ip.run_cell(cell.input)

but keep in mid please, the cell will be run under this code, not like as function in py does

I think the best way in this case would be to write a procedure and run it as much as you want. But as a brain workout, I would suggest two options.

1. To execute the code from the cell when some condition is met (suppose we want to reuse the third one as in your example), you can use exec

if condition:
    exec(In[3])

2. More reliable solution may be with marked cells and a magic command rerun:

if condition:
    %rerun -g 'unique mark'

But again, I'm pretty sure the best way is to write a procedure and reuse it.