Load a given URL into an HTML browser.
browseURL(url, browser = getOption("browser"),
encodeIfNeeded = FALSE)
a non-empty character string giving the URL to be loaded. Some platforms also accept file paths.
a non-empty character string giving the name of the program to be used as the HTML browser. It should be in the PATH, or a full path specified. Alternatively, an R function to be called to invoke the browser.
Under Windows NULL
is also allowed (and is the default), and
implies that the file association mechanism will be used.
Should the URL be encoded by
URLencode
before passing to the browser? This is not
needed (and might be harmful) if the browser
program/function
itself does encoding, and can be harmful for file:// URLs on some
systems and for http:// URLs passed to some CGI applications.
Fortunately, most URLs do not need encoding.
Which URL schemes are accepted is platform-specific: expect http://, https:// and ftp:// to work, but mailto: may or may not (and if it does may not use the user's preferred email client).
For the file:// scheme the format accepted (if any) can depend on both browser and OS.
The default browser is set by option "browser"
, in turn set by
the environment variable R_BROWSER
which is by default set in
file R_HOME/etc/Renviron
to a choice
made manually or automatically when R was configured. (See
Startup
for where to override that default value.)
To suppress showing URLs altogether, use the value "false"
.
On many platforms it is best to set option "browser"
to a
generic program/script and let that invoke the user's choice of
browser. For example, on macOS use open
and on many other
Unix-alikes use xdg-open
.
If browser
supports remote control and R knows how to perform
it, the URL is opened in any already-running browser or a new one if
necessary. This mechanism currently is available for browsers which
support the "-remote openURL(...)"
interface (which includes
Mozilla and Opera), Galeon, KDE konqueror (via kfmclient) and
the GNOME interface to Mozilla. (Firefox has dropped support, but
defaults to using an already-running browser.) Note that the type of
browser is determined from its name, so this mechanism will only be
used if the browser is installed under its canonical name.
Because "-remote"
will use any browser displaying on the X
server (whatever machine it is running on), the remote control
mechanism is only used if DISPLAY
points to the local host.
This may not allow displaying more than one URL at a time from a
remote host.
It is the caller's responsibility to encode url
if necessary
(see URLencode
).
To suppress showing URLs altogether, set browser = "false"
.
The behaviour for arguments url
which are not URLs is
platform-dependent. Some platforms accept absolute file paths; fewer
accept relative file paths.
The default browser is set by option "browser"
, in turn set by
the environment variable R_BROWSER
if that is set, otherwise to
NULL
.
To suppress showing URLs altogether, use the value "false"
.
Some browsers have required :
be replaced by |
in file
paths: others do not accept that. All seem to accept \
as a
path separator even though the RFC1738 standard requires /
.
To suppress showing URLs altogether, set browser = "false"
.
# NOT RUN {
## for KDE users who want to open files in a new tab
options(browser = "kfmclient newTab")
browseURL("https://www.r-project.org")
## On Windows-only, something like
browseURL("file://d:/R/R-2.5.1/doc/html/index.html",
browser = "C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe")
# }
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