Clear widget area of a cell in a Jupyter notebook from within notebook

Question

I'm wondering if it's possible to clear the widget area of a cell in a Jupyter notebook from the notebook side (ie within Python). IPython.display.clear_output() only clears the cell's output area not the widget area.

Update: this still seems to be a problem in latest Notebook and ipywidgets. Here are two minimal examples illustrating the problem I'm struggling with. The widget output that I'm trying to clear in particular are the data frames rendered by qgrid. In both cases, despite trying to clear the previous widget output, subsequent selections cause a table to be appended after the previous one. Each new table is appended as a div with the class p-Widget.

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import qgrid
from ipywidgets import interact
from IPython.display import display, clear_output
import notebook
import ipywidgets

print('Jupyter Notebook version: {}'.format(notebook.__version__))
print('ipywidgets version: {}'.format(ipywidgets.__version__))

max_columns = 10
max_rows = 10    
col_opts = list(range(1, max_columns + 1))
row_opts = list(range(1, max_rows + 1))

First attempt using interact:

@interact(columns=col_opts, rows=row_opts)
def submit(columns, rows):
    df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(0, 100, size=(rows, columns)))
    clear_output()
    display(qgrid.QGridWidget(df=df)

Second attempt using the Output widget:

output = ipywidgets.Output()
display(output)

def submit2(change):
    rows = row_input.value
    columns = col_input.value
    df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(0, 100, size=(rows, columns)))

    with output:
        output.clear_output()
        display(qgrid.QGridWidget(df=df))

col_input = ipywidgets.Dropdown(options=col_opts)
row_input = ipywidgets.Dropdown(options=row_opts)

col_input.observe(submit2, 'value')
row_input.observe(submit2, 'value')

display(col_input)
display(row_input)

Answer 1

From ipywidgets version 7.0 onwards, widgets are considered like any other output. To prevent the widgets from clearing(but clearing the text output) when you do clear_output(), use the Output widget. Something like this :

from IPython.display import display, clear_output
import ipywidgets as widgets
import random

b = widgets.Button(
    description='Show Random',
    disabled=False,
    button_style='info',
    tooltip='Click me',
    icon='check'
)
display(b)

out = widgets.Output()
display(out)

def on_button_clicked(b):
    with out:
        clear_output()
        print("New hello from each button click!. This hello from {}.".format(random.choice(list(range(100)))))

b.on_click(on_button_clicked)