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I have a very simple problem with Mathematica that I couldn't find an easy answer to. I have long notebook with a lot of cells and want to evaluate a specific cells inline from another cell.

So far I have been trying to put tags on the cells and then use: NotebookEvaluate[EvaluationNotebook[], EvaluationElements -> "Tags" -> {tag1, tag2,..}]

I thought that this should do it, but instead it always evaluates the whole notebook and gets stuck in a loop. Is there something slightly wrong, or a trick with the tag names? Or am I doing something conceptually wrong?

Btw it works fine if I use the option EvaluationElements-> "InitializationCell" but doesn't work properly with the "Tags" option.

Mike Honeychurch
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Gradd
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  • possible bug. With V9 on OS X I get repeated (endless loop) print statements – Mike Honeychurch Jan 08 '15 at 07:58
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  • I can reproduce the problem in V9.0.1 on Win7/64. It evaluates all elements in the notebook, ignoring the EvaluationElements. If the NotebookEvaluate expression is in the target notebook, it loops indefinitely. In V10.0.2 it works properly, even from within the same notebook. – WReach Jan 08 '15 at 15:30

1 Answers1

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Assuming you are doing this in the same notebook then:

nb = EvaluationNotebook[];
NotebookFind[nb, "tag1", All, CellTags]
SelectionEvaluate[nb]

If you have several tagged cells that you want to evaluate then

(NotebookFind[nb, #, All, CellTags];SelectionEvaluate[nb]) & /@ {"tag1", "tag2"}

Edit

The above is the way I would normally do it because it predates the addition of EvaluationElements. I tried that method and it failed in V9. Additionally the example in the docs fails (V9 OS X) which seems a good enough reason to call this a V9 bug.

Contrary to earlier edit this is now working in V10.

Mike Honeychurch
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    +1. When I tried it in V10.0.2 (Win 7/64) it worked perfectly, evaluating all (and only) tagged cells. NotebookEvaluate is defined to return only the value from the last evaluation, so it is hard to see the failure from just the screenshot since none of the cells have visible side-effects. Does it fail if the evaluated cells contain Print expressions, or the InsertResults -> True option is included? – WReach Jan 08 '15 at 15:40
  • @WReach you are correct. It is working okay in V10. It looks like a V9 bug only -- fixed in 10. – Mike Honeychurch Jan 08 '15 at 22:14
  • Thank you Mike, your solution works for me. I am indeed using V9 so there seems to be a bug with the EvaluationElements option. But your workaround does give the desired result in V9. Thanks a lot! – Gradd Jan 09 '15 at 06:09