browseURL
Load URL into an HTML Browser
Load a given URL into an HTML browser.
- Keywords
- file
Usage
browseURL(url, browser = getOption("browser"),
encodeIfNeeded = FALSE)
Arguments
- url
- a non-empty character string giving the URL to be loaded.
- 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 Rfunction 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 thebrowser
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.
Details
- The default browser is set by option
"browser"
, in turn set by the environment variableR_BROWSER which is by default set in fileR_HOME/etc/Renviron to a choice made manually or automatically when Rwas configured. (SeeStartup
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 OS X useopen and on many other Unix-alikes use xdg-open. If browser
supports remote control and Rknows 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 ifDISPLAY
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 (seeURLencode
). This can be tricky for file URLs, where the format accepted can depend on both browser and OS.To suppress showing URLs altogether, set
browser = "false"
. The behaviour for argumentsurl
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 variableR_BROWSER if that is set, otherwise toNULL
. 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
library(utils)
browseURL("https://www.r-project.org")
browseURL("file://d:/R/R-2.5.1/doc/html/index.html",
browser = "C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe")