5 Send URL: Opening a Web Browser
| (require net/sendurl) | package: net-lib |
See also browser/external, which requires racket/gui, but can prompt the user for a browser if no browser preference is set.
procedure
(send-url str [ separate-window? #:escape? escape?]) → void? str : string? separate-window? : any/c = #t escape? : any/c = #t
On Windows, send-url normally uses shell-execute to launch a browser. (If the URL appears to contain a fragment, it may use an intermediate redirecting file due to a bug in IE7.)
On Mac OS X, send-url runs osascript to start the user’s chosen browser.
On Unix, send-url uses a user-preference, or when none is set, it will look for a known browser. See the description of external-browser for details.
If escape? is true, then str is escaped (by UTF-8 encoding followed by “%” encoding) to avoid dangerous shell characters: single quotes, double quotes, backquotes, dollar signs, backslashes, non-ASCII characters, and non-graphic characters. Note that escaping does not affect already-encoded characters in str.
On all platforms, external-browser parameter can be set to a
procedure to override the above behavior —
procedure
(send-url/file path [ separate-window? #:fragment fragment #:query query]) → void? path : path-string? separate-window? : any/c = #t fragment : (or/c string? false/c) = #f query : (or/c string? false/c) = #f
The path, fragment, and query arguments are all encoded in the same way as a path provided to send-url, which means that already-encoded characters are used as-is.
procedure
(send-url/contents contents [ separate-window? #:fragment fragment #:query query #:delete-at seconds]) → void? contents : string? separate-window? : any/c = #t fragment : (or/c string? false/c) = #f query : (or/c string? false/c) = #f seconds : (or/c number? false/c) = #f
When send-url/content is called, it scans old generated files (this happens randomly, not on every call) and removes them to avoid cluttering the temporary directory. If the #:delete-at argument is a number, then the temporary file is more eagerly removed after the specified number of seconds; the deletion happens in a thread, so if Racket exits earlier, the deletion will not happen. If the #:delete-at argument is #f, no eager deletion happens, but old temporary files are still deleted as described above.
procedure
(send-url/mac url [#:browser browser]) → void?
url : string? browser : (or/c string? #f) = #f
(send-url/mac "http://www.google.com/" #:browser "Firefox")
parameter
(external-browser cmd) → void? cmd : browser-preference?
On Unix, the command that is used depends on the 'external-browser preference. If the preference is unset, send-url uses the first of the browsers from unix-browser-list for which the executable is found. Otherwise, the preference should hold a symbol indicating a known browser (from the unix-browser-list), or it a pair of a prefix and a suffix string that are concatenated around the url string to make up a shell command to run. In addition, the external-browser paremeter can be set to one of these values, and send-url will use it instead of the preference value.
Note that the URL is encoded to make it work inside shell double-quotes: URLs can still hold characters like #, ?, and &, so if the external-browser is set to a pair of prefix/suffix strings, they should use double quotes around the url.
If the preferred or default browser can’t be launched, send-url fails. See get-preference and put-preferences for details on setting preferences.
procedure
(browser-preference? a) → boolean?
a : any/c
value