Python webbrowser module
Import webbrowser
module
In Python interactive shell, import the webbrowser
module:
>>> import webbrowser as wb
The two methods we will be concerned with are get
and open_new
which can be listed using dir(wb)
:
>>> dir(wb)
['BackgroundBrowser', 'BaseBrowser', 'Chrome', 'Chromium', 'Elinks', 'Error', 'Galeon', 'GenericBrowser', 'Grail', 'Konqueror', 'Mozilla', 'Netscape', 'Opera', 'UnixBrowser', '__all__', '__builtins__', '__cached__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__loader__', '__name__', '__package__', '__spec__', '_browsers', '_lock', '_os_preferred_browser', '_synthesize', '_tryorder', 'get', 'main', 'open', 'open_new', 'open_new_tab', 'os', 'register', 'register_X_browsers', 'register_standard_browsers', 'shlex', 'shutil', 'subprocess', 'sys', 'threading']
After confirming that get
and open_new
are available to the webbrowser
module, an instruction can be written:
get() method
wb.get()
will be passed a specific web browser name string argument, which returns a browser type controller object. In this case, we will use google-chrome
for the example:
>>> wb.get('google-chrome')
<webbrowser.Chrome object at 0x7f472ef06a60>
open_new() method
The final method we will be concerned with is open_new
which can be listed using dir(wb.get('google-chrome'))
:
>>> dir(wb.get('google-chrome'))
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', '_invoke', 'args', 'background', 'basename', 'name', 'open', 'open_new', 'open_new_tab', 'raise_opts', 'redirect_stdout', 'remote_action', 'remote_action_newtab', 'remote_action_newwin', 'remote_args']
wb.get().open_new()
will be passed a specific URL string argument, which opens a new web browser instance in Google Chrome:
>>> wb.get('google-chrome').open_new('http://www.python.org')
True
If all goes well, the Python interactive shell (aka REPL) will open a browser page and return True
in the shell.