Create unique url's / anchors for each code cell

[darribas]

trafficstars

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Very often, once I have created a resource on JB, I find myself wanting to link to specific code cells to illustrate a solution for questions from students, for example.

Describe the solution you'd like

I know it is possible to create unique links with the (<id>)= pattern but this'd require to manually hardcode it on to every code cell just in case/for when some of them will be required.

Ideally, in a similar way to how there is a button that appears on the cell to copy the code, there'd be another one that provides a unique and direct URL to that code cell (it could perhaps be related to the cell number/position in the underlying notebook?).

Describe alternatives you've considered

Currently I default to link to the closest section on which that cell belongs to, and mostly works; or create manual links if I know I'll need them.

[choldgraf]

This is a cool idea - I'm not sure where the best place would be to implement this, since we'd be bottlenecked on how Sphinx itself handles cross-refs (I think that you must put a label just before a header title, for example). But would be cool to experiment with and implement.

[chrisjsewell]

Oh its already in my thinking for myst-nb: I've already implemented a similar thing previously for ipypublish: https://ipypublish.readthedocs.io/en/latest/code_cells.html#plots-with-matplotlib

[choldgraf]

Nice - shall we move this to myst-nb then?

[chrisjsewell]

Yep sounds good 👍

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[krassowski]

Anchors for cell based on cell IDs have been implemented in JupyterLab (https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/13285) and nbconvert (https://github.com/jupyter/nbconvert/pull/1897). There is also a related issue open on Jupyter Book repo https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/issues/1812.

[krassowski]

Could the myst_parser expose the _heading_slugs logic from https://github.com/executablebooks/MyST-Parser/pull/718 so that we could add anchors to cells reusing the same reference collection logic?

Edit: I mean having a function similar to existing generate_heading_target, but allowing to set an arbitrary slug (and use it on cell nodes).

[krassowski]

@chrisjsewell would you agree that the above proposal of exposing _heading_slugs logic is going in the right direction? I can open a PR against MyST-parser to complement the preliminary work in https://github.com/executablebooks/MyST-NB/pull/519 but would appreciate an early feedback.

[krassowski]

https://github.com/executablebooks/MyST-NB/pull/519 is ready for review; I will need help over there - despite many attempts the slugs do not get embedded as identifiers in the cells. It seems like the target processing code does not get invoked but I cannot narrow it down why.