Clickable hyperlinks

[Michael Torrie]

On 01/04/2017 03:58 PM, Deborah Swanson wrote:
> Thank you, thank you! Finally, at least one person on this list knows
> about something (anything) in the python world that is internet aware.
> It's also occurred to me that Beautifulsoup downloads data from a url,
> so that code must have access to some kind of an internet engine too.

Except that you never mentioned anything about this in your posts before. It 
seemed to me you were asking about printing out clickable hyperlinks with 
python.  Calling the OS to launch a browser to view a url is a different beast 
which is why no one mentioned it before.

If you don't tell us what you're actually trying to do (your end goal), things 
are more frustrating for everyone.  If you had said early on you just want to 
be able to send the user to a particular url in a web browser, what Chris 
suggested would have been said a long time ago, rather than focusing on console 
output which is what you were asking about and focusing attention on.

Just so you know, BeautifulSoup does not do any internet access itself; it's 
only an HTML parser. You have to fetch web pages using something like python's 
urllib and then feed the data to BeautifulSoup.  urllib is not a web browser 
though.  It can pretend to be a browser as far as the server is concerned but 
it knows nothing about javascript or rendering. It just retrieves bytes which 
you can then feed to BeautifulSoup or some other parser.

> Yes, I'd gotten as far as figuring out that you don't need a clickable
> link. Code that opens a url in a browse would do the job just fine.

Good! I just wish you would have mentioned this much earlier as your end goal.

> Or the webbrowser.open("http://......./") in a Linux terminal you suggest.
> (I just have to get my Linux machine up and running again to try it.)

The webbrowser module does not require console or terminal output. It will work 
on Windows or Linux if I'm not mistaken.  It asks the OS to launch the default 
browser and load the indicated url.

> All in all, given that clickable urls in a console is a non-starter,
> this hits the nail on the head. Many thanks again!