Writing cells from other notebooks into current notebook?

Question

I have a large number of Mathematica notebooks which contain study notes for different topics (as opposed to actual Mathematica Code).

I'm trying to develop some code to randomly pull parts of a given notebook into the current notebook ... to use as a kind of flashcard system for reviewing notes.

I've gotten this far:

SetDirectory["/Users/Bill/Desktop/Notebooks"];
nb = NotebookOpen[FindFile["chemistry.nb"], Visible -> False];
sections = NotebookLookup[nb, "CellExpression", Cell[___, "Section", ___]];
NotebookWrite[InputNotebook[], RandomChoice[sections]]

This small amount of code, when evaluated, will write to the current notebook a random section heading cell, from the notebook chemistry.nb.

This is great ... but what I actually want to is write to the current notebook the section heading cell, and all the content cells beneath it (Subsections, Items, ItemParagraphs, Text, etc).

Does anyone know how to do this? There seems to be no built in documentation for NotebookLookup, I only discovered it when I came across this file: http://www.mathematica-journal.com/issue/v9i2/contents/AuthorTools/AuthorTools.pdf

Answer 1

You can try SelectionMovelike this:

 SelectionMove[nb, Next, CellGroup]

or

SelectionMove[nb, All, CellGroup]

one of these should work in your case

EDIT:

Full Solution for an arbitrary notebook:

nb = CreateWindow[
DocumentNotebook[{CellGroup[{TextCell["Text Group", "Section"], 
   TextCell["Mary had a little lamb.", "Text"], 
   TextCell["Its fleece was white as snow.", "Text"]}], 
 CellGroup[{TextCell["Graphics Group", "Section"], 
   ExpressionCell[ Plot[Exp[-x^2], {x, -3, 3}], "Output"]}]}]];

sections = Cells[nb, CellStyle -> "Section"]
SelectionMove[RandomChoice[sections], All, CellGroup]
read = NotebookRead[nb];
NotebookWrite[EvaluationNotebook[], read]