Clickable hyperlinks

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2017 03:46 pm, Deborah Swanson wrote:

> As I've mentioned in other posts on this thread, I'm now thinking that I
> need to write a class to do this, and find out how Firefox and url aware
> terminals in Linux do it. There must be a way.


A GUI application can interpret text any way it chooses. Firefox takes a
HTML file and renders it, using whatever GUI library it chooses. That GUI
library understands that text like:

<b>Hello World!</b>

should be shown in bold face, and text like:

<a href="http://www.example.com">Example</a>

should be shown as the word "Example" underlined and in some colour, and
when you click on it the browser will navigate to the URL given. Firefox
can do this because it controls the environment it runs in.

Same for Excel, which also controls the environment it runs in.

That's *not* the case for Python, which is at the mercy of whatever console
or terminal application it is running in.

However, you can use Python to write GUI applications. Then it becomes
*your* responsibility to create the window, populate it with any buttons or
text or scroll bars you want, and you can choose to interpret text any way
you like -- including as clickable Hyperlinks.

The bottom line is, there is no "a way" to do this. There are a thousand,
ten thousand, ways to do it. Every web browser, every terminal, every
URL-aware application, can choose its own way to do it. There's no one
single way that works everywhere, but if you are working in a console or
terminal, just printing the URL is likely to be interpreted by the console
as a clickable link:

print("http://www.example.com")




-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.