Forum Archive

Webbrowser register and get do not to seem to be valid attributes

webbrowser.register('chrome')
webbrowser.get('chrome')

Is there a way to open a specific browser?

Tia

webbrowser.open(url[, modal=False])

If you want to open http or https URLs in Safari instead of the built-in browser, you can replace http(s) with safari-http(s) in your URL, e.g. ‘safari-http://google.com’.

To open a URL in Chrome on iOS, you can simply replace http:// with googlechrome:// in the URL (https:// becomes googlechromes://)

Example: webbrowser.open('googlechrome://apple.com').

That works in programs when run directly from Pythonista (Python 2.7), but not if the program is run from another app via the sharing extension.

I saw another post in the forum that showed using ~~PyObjC~~ Objective-C via objc_util to open URLs in the default browser (Safari), but I don't know how to make it open them in Chrome instead. (Again, via the app sharing extension.)

@lsloan To open a URL in Chrome, you can simply replace http:// with googlechrome:// (or https:// with googlechromes://), so e.g. to open apple.com in Chrome, you'd use googlechrome://apple.com as the URL.

@lsloan Example:

from objc_util import *
app = UIApplication.sharedApplication()
app.openURL_(nsurl('googlechrome://apple.com'))

Thanks for the clarification, @omz. Shortly before you replied, I thought that I should just try that and it worked.

When I asked about it, I thought maybe it would be necessary to specify Chrome as an argument to sharedApplication() or some other method. I'm glad it's really just that simple.

I'd like to suggest that the Pythonista documentation be updated to explain that using webbrowser.open() doesn't work to open other applications via the application sharing extension/mechanism. That is, add a note about that and give an example of the UIApplication.sharedApplication() method that works instead. These pages seem like good places for this update:

• http://omz-software.com/pythonista2/docs/ios/urlscheme.html#launching-other-apps
• http://omz-software.com/pythonista2/docs/library/webbrowser.html#webbrowser.open

(And the corresponding documentation for the newer Pythonista.)

If the documentation had mentioned this already, it would literally have saved me hours of frustration. I thought I was using webbrowser.open() incorrectly.

Also, what's happened with the "list of third-party applications that have URL schemes" that was available at http://handleopenurl.com/? It appears to be defunct. Is there a replacement resource?

It was in the doc

To launch an app, I use th Launcher (free) app which gives a list of all apps it can launch via their URL.