Clickable hyperlinks

[Michael Torrie]

On 01/03/2017 04:32 PM, Deborah Swanson wrote:
> The GUI consoles I have are in Pycharm, the IDLE that comes with
> Anaconda, and Spyder. PyCharm and IDLE both ask for internet access when
> I open them, so they're capable of opening links, but whether that means
> their output space is capable of handling clickable links I don't know.

Hmm I still don't understand what you mean by "GUI console."  Just
because a program asks for internet access does not mean anything about
whether or not your python program can display a clickable link in a
console window.  Besides that, a clickable link would probably ask the
OS to open it with the default application, not cause your program to
access the internet.

The standard out pipe (where stuff goes when you call print() or write
to sys.stdout) from a python program usually goes to a console or a
terminal emulator.  PyCharm and IDLE both provide windows to display
this output (they emulate a terminal). But maybe you're misunderstanding
what this actually is.  These windows just display a stream of bytes
that come out of your program.  Certain escape codes can be emitted that
can instruct the console or terminal emulator to do things like set text
color or display text at a certain position. But there's certainly no
special way to instruct the terminal emulator to make a section of text
into a hyperlink.  Maybe if hyperlinks had existed years ago when
terminal escape codes were being defined we'd have a "hyperlink" code
that all consoles and terminals would understand.  A few years ago I saw
some proposals to add an escape code to the ANSI scheme that would
encode hyperlinks, but nothing ever came of it because, honestly, it
would be too much hassle to roll this out to ever terminal emulator out
there (to say nothing of real terminals).

> I do know printing a full url with the %s specifier or entering a url
> and clicking enter just gives you the plain text url. Obviously, not all
> GUI consoles are enabled recognize and make clickable links from
> correctly formatted urls.

On my Linux machine, the terminal emulators I've used all make a regular
url printed out into a clickable link (or at least a right-clickable
link).  This is just something they try to do with all things that look
like urls.  Sometimes it's helpful, often it's annoying.

> I was hoping there was some functionality in python to make clickable
> links. Could be a package, if the core language doesn't have it.

No, there is not.  If you made a full GUI app using a toolkit like GTK
or Qt, you can indeed place hyperlinks on your forms and the operating
system will automatically connect them to the web browser.  But not in
text-mode terminal apps.