Call to operating system to open url?

Solution 1:

Here is how to open the user's default browser with a given url:

import webbrowser

url = "https://www.google.com/"

webbrowser.open(url, new=0, autoraise=True)

Here is the documentation about this functionality. It's part of Python's stdlibs:

http://docs.python.org/library/webbrowser.html

I have tested this successfully on Linux, Ubuntu 10.10.

Solution 2:

Personally I really wouldn't use the webbrowser module.

It's a complicated mess of sniffing for particular browsers, which will won't find the user's default browser if they have more than one installed, and won't find a browser if it doesn't know the name of it (eg Chrome).

Better on Windows is simply to use the os.startfile function, which also works on a URL. On OS X, you can use the open system command. On Linux there's xdg-open, a freedesktop.org standard command supported by GNOME, KDE and XFCE.

if sys.platform=='win32':
    os.startfile(url)
elif sys.platform=='darwin':
    subprocess.Popen(['open', url])
else:
    try:
        subprocess.Popen(['xdg-open', url])
    except OSError:
        print 'Please open a browser on: '+url

This will give a better user experience on mainstream platforms. You could fall back to webbrowser on other platforms, perhaps. Though most likely if you're on an obscure/unusual/embedded OS where none of the above work, chances are webbrowser will fail too.