title: IPython Notebook Open File Dialog (retrieve the full path)
body: <p>An ipython notebook is a document that is read by the browser that contains both rich text and python code.</p>
  
  <p>In scientific computing ipython notebooks are often used to perform an analysis some input data file that resides on the local file system.</p>
  
  <p>Instead of manually pasting the full path of the file containing the data into a variable, would be convenient to be able to launch an open-file dialog in order to browse the local file system and select the file. The full path of the file should be returned in a variable (in python).</p>
  
  <p>This can be achieved launching an open-file dialog from a GUI toolkit (i.e. QT). For an example see <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20790926/ipython-notebook-open-select-file-with-gui-qt-dialog">IPython Notebook: Open/select file with GUI (Qt Dialog)</a>.</p>
  
  <p>However, using QT has some disadvantages. First it is an additional dependency. Second it requires enabling the QT gui integration in the notebook and this results in conflicts with the inline plots (see <a href="https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/5798" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>).</p>
  
  <p>The question here is, is it possible to obtain the full path using only Javascript?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> The answer posted below only returns the file name, not the full-path.</p>