webbrowser.open("./documentation/help.html")-- No Go in Windows

[Chris Rebert]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 12:28 PM, llanitedave <llanitedave at veawb.coop> wrote:
> On Sunday, February 24, 2013 1:35:31 AM UTC-8, Chris Rebert wrote:
>> On Feb 24, 2013 1:21 AM, "llanitedave" <llani... at veawb.coop> wrote:
>> > I created an html help page for my Python 2.7.3 application and put it in a documentation folder.  I used webbrowser.open() to fetch the page.
>> > On linux -- KDE specifically, the command opens the local file on my default browser with no issues.  However, on Windows 7, it opens Internet Explorer, which doesn't even search the local folder, but goes straight to the web and does a Google search, returning nothing but useless noise.
>> > My default browser on Windows is Chrome, so my intention is getting undermined right from the start.
>> > How do I get a local html file to open properly from Python in Windows?
>>
>> Sounds like this might be your problem:
>> http://bugs.python.org/issue8936
>>
>> The fix would seem to be ensuring that the URL you pass includes the scheme (in your case, "file:").
>
> Holy Toledo!  That's a two-year-old bug spanning two versions of the language!
>
> BTW, Chris, the snippet I showed in the title essentially WAS the exact code.

Sorry, my bad. This is why I dislike messages that put critical info
*only* in the subject line; I tend not to reread the subject line once
I've opened the message.

>  It's a method with that single line called from a wxPython Help menu.  I can't really put an absolute pathname into the argument, because the application is going to be distributed to a variety of computers at my workplace, and there's no assurance that it will go into (or remain in)a particular folder.

As Demian demonstrated, you can simply compute the absolute path from
the relative path at runtime; although I would probably toss an
abspath() call in for good measure
(http://docs.python.org/2/library/os.path.html#os.path.abspath ).

> This to me illustrates the downside of the Python philosophy of "There should be only one obvious way to do things".  If that one obvious way has a fatal bug, you're pretty much SOL.

On the other hand, you don't have to investigate which of N APIs is
the "fixed"/"correct" one (Which PHP MySQL function is safe from SQL
injection again?), and you only have wait for 1 fix instead of N. But
yes, some of Python's included batteries are due for some recharging.

Cheers,
Chris