Clickable hyperlinks

[Deborah Swanson]

Steven D'Aprano wrote, on January 03, 2017 9:40 PM
>
> On Wednesday 04 January 2017 15:46, Deborah Swanson wrote:
>
> > Steven D'Aprano wrote, on January 03, 2017 8:04 PM
> [...]
> >> Of course you have to put quotes around them to enter them in your
> >> source code. We don't expect this to work:
> >>
> >>     print(Hello World!)
> >>
> >>
> >> you have to use a string literal with quotes:
> >>
> >>     print('Hello World!')
> >>
> >>
> >> Same for all of the above.
>
> > I didn't try printing them before, but I just did. Got:
> >
> >>>> print([Example](http://www.example.com)
> >
> > SyntaxError: invalid syntax  (arrow pointing at the colon)
>
> You missed the part where I said you have to put them in quotes.
>
> Like any other string in Python, you have to use quotation
> marks around it for
> Python to understand it as a string. None of these things will work:
>
> print( Hello World! )
>
> print( What do you want to do today? )
>
> print( 3 2 1 blast off )
>
> print( http://www.example.com )
>
>
> This isn't specific to print. This won't work either:
>
> message = Hello World!
>
> In *all* of these cases, you have to tell Python you're
> dealing with a string,
> and you do that with quotation marks:
>
> message = "Hello World!"
> print( 'What do you want to do today?' )
> count_down = '3 2 1 blast off'
> url = 'http://www.example.com'
>
>
>
>
> --
> Steven

Thanks, Steven. Yes, of course if you want to print strings you must enclose 
them in quotes. I think you learn that in Week 1 of any introductory course on 
Python.

But we aren't trying to print strings here, the point is to produce clickable 
links. I didn't enclose them with quotes because I didn't see any point in 
printing plain text when I wanted clickable links. I actually didn't understand 
why you thought I should print them, but it never would have occurred to me 
that you wanted me to print out a bunch of silly plain text strings, apparently 
just for the heck of it.

At this point, if I pursue this any farther, it will be to look into how 
Firefox takes webpage titles and urls out of its sqlite database and makes 
objects you can click on to open the webpages. That's the basic technology I'd 
need to find a way to talk (write) python into doing.

If it's even worth it. On a practical level it's not worth it, way too much 
work for the teensy advantage of having it to use. It might be some giggles to 
figure out how to do it and maybe I will sometime just for funsies.

My original question was whether python had anything to provide this 
functionality, and the answer appears to be a resounding NO!!!

Answer received, and thanks to all who contributed.