How to retrive the notebook contents or the url of a particular cell in Google colab

Is there a way to get or compute the URL to a cell in Colab? I know you can click on a link button to get the url, or click on the TOC and get the #scrollTo=J1nFJPC9V1-X part of the URL, but I want a way to generate this.

The use case is I search colabs for headlines, and I want to generate a link that opens a colab to that heading. Suppose I know the id for a colab, and I know it has a heading called "Printing arrays". I want to generate a full link that opens it at that cell.

Is it possible to compute the scrollTo part, or retrieve it somehow?

Solution

Here's an example snippet that will find the cell ID with particular contents:

from google.colab import _message

# Load the notebook JSON.
nb = _message.blocking_request('get_ipynb')

# Search for the markdown cell with the particular contents.
for cell in nb['ipynb']['cells']:
  if (cell['cell_type'] == 'markdown' and 
      '\n'.join(cell['source']).find('## Printing arrays') >= 0):
    print (f'Cell ID for header is #{cell["metadata"]["id"]}')

Here's a complete example notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/11jOuhB7wzm1d2P85mrmhBWycogJ_9F0q