utils (version 3.4.1)

browseURL: Load URL into an HTML Browser

Description

Load a given URL into an HTML browser.

Usage

browseURL(url, browser = getOption("browser"),
          encodeIfNeeded = FALSE)

Arguments

url

a non-empty character string giving the URL to be loaded. Some platforms also accept file paths.

browser

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.

encodeIfNeeded

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.

URL schemes

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.

Details

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".

Examples

## for KDE users who want to open files in a new tab
options(browser = "kfmclient newTab")
browseURL("https://www.r-project.org")