How can I open an existing Jupyter notebook programmatically from inside an open Jupyter notebook

Question

My scenario is this...

From within a Jupyter Notebook (NB) I want to open another NB, so I locate my current working directory by typing:

import os
os.getcwd()

So I get a listing:

Volume in drive C is OSDisk Volume Serial Number is 8AD4-7C2E

Directory of C:\\Users\\rlysak01\\Desktop\\02-PyCoreBootcamp\\03-Object-and-Data Structure Basics\\Core_Language_Explanations

03/04/2019 05:32 PM testfolder 02/23/2019 03:22 PM 66,763 Untitled.ipynb 4 File(s) 117,932 bytes 4 Dir(s) 1,962,647,552 bytes free

Now I want to open the NB named "untitled.ipynb" to see what's in it.

A Google search only finds ways to launch a new server and open a specified NB from within that new server process.

Is there a way to open that notebook without starting a new Jupyter server on my local machine?

When I try

nb_to_open = os.getcwd() + '\\untitled.ipynb'
open(nb_to_open)

I get the following response, but the notebook does not open:

<_io.TextIOWrapper name='C:\\Users\\rlysak01\\Desktop\\02-PyCoreBootcamp\\untitled.ipynb' mode='r' encoding='cp1252'>

What I really want is to put that file information into the current Notebook server process and open it in a new browser window.

Answer 1

I figured out that I can MANUALLY copy the URL from the current notebook's browser address field and add the NB filename to the URL, but this involves a tedious manual step.

If the current URL is this: http://localhost:8888/notebooks/Desktop/02-PyCoreBootcamp/

I can manually hack it to be this:

http://localhost:8888/notebooks/Desktop/02-PyCoreBootcamp/untitled.ipynb

Then I convert the Jupyter code cell to a Markdown cell, execute the Markdown cell and click on the http hyperlink in the markdown cell.

But this is a manual hack that I want to do complete via Python in the Jupyter NB cell.

If I can find the URL programmatically, then I could add my filename onto the end of the URL.