Call a python function within a html file

You'll need to use a web framework to route the requests to Python, as you can't do that with just HTML. Flask is one simple framework:

server.py:

from flask import Flask, render_template
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def index():
  return render_template('template.html')

@app.route('/my-link/')
def my_link():
  print 'I got clicked!'

  return 'Click.'

if __name__ == '__main__':
  app.run(debug=True)

templates/template.html:

<!doctype html>

<title>Test</title> 
<meta charset=utf-8> 

<a href="/my-link/">Click me</a>

Run it with python server.py and then navigate to http://localhost:5000/. The development server isn't secure, so for deploying your application, look at http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/quickstart/#deploying-to-a-web-server


Yes, but not directly; you can set the onclick handler to invoke a JavaScript function that will construct an XMLHttpRequest object and send a request to a page on your server. That page on your server can, in turn, be implemented using Python and do whatever it would need to do.


Yes. If the link points to your web server, then you can set up your web server to run any kind of code when that link is clicked, and return the result of that code to the user's browser. There are many ways to write a web server like this. For example, see Django. You might also want to use AJAX.

If you want to run code in the user's browser, use Javascript.