Clickable hyperlinks

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/4/2017 4:32 AM, Deborah Swanson wrote:

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

I would say 'Yes, but with user effort'.

To have a string interpreted as a clickable link, you send the string to 
software capable of creating a clickable link, plus the information 
'this is a clickable link'*.  There are two ways to tag a string as a 
link.  One is to use markup around the url in the string itself. 
'<url>' and html are example.  Python provides multiple to make this 
easy. The other is to tag the string with a separate argument.  Python 
provides tkinter, which wraps tk Text widgets, which have a powerful tag 
system.  One can define a Link tag that will a) cause text to be 
displayed, for instance, blue and underlined and b) cause clicks on the 
text to generate a web request.  One could then use
   mytext.insert('insert', 'http://www.example.com', Link)
Browser must do something similar when they encounter when they 
encounter html link tags.

* If the software directly recognizes a bare url such as 
'http://www.example.com' as a link, without further indication, then it 
should have a way to disable conversion to a clickable link.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy