Python Script to Open a Web Browser

In this article we will be discussing some of the methods that can be used to open a web browser (of our choice) and visit the URL we specified, using python scripts.

In the Python package, we have a module named webbrowser, which includes a lot of methods that we can use to open the required URL in any specified browser we want. For that, we just have to import this module to our script file, and then we have to call some of its functions (declared and defined below) with our required inputs. Hence this module will then open up the browser we want and will get the page we want.

The methods present in this module are described below:

Now we are going to use these methods to see how we could open browsers with our passed URLs. 

Below is the implementation:

We have used an URL = https://www.geeksforgeeks.org, for this experiment. Our python script is stored in a file named geeks.py. Below is the code which we had written and implemented in it.

Example 1: Basic example of Open Web Browser in Python Script

# first import the module
import webbrowser

# then make a url variable
url = "https://www.geeksforgeeks.org"

# then call the default open method described above
webbrowser.open(url)

Hence as a result the website got opened in the default web browser. As in mine, it is opened in Microsoft Edge as shown below:

Example 2: Specify the browser

# first import the module
import webbrowser

# then make a url variable
url = "https://www.geeksforgeeks.org"

# then call the get method to select the code 
# for new browser and call open method 
# described above
webbrowser.get('chrome').open(url)

# results in error since chrome is not registered initially.

Run the command in the prompt by typing "python geeks.py" and it will give the results. If we will try to open the browser of our choice without registering it for the first time then we will get the below-given type of response as an output.

Hence below given is the code which we modified so that it now registers the browsers and then opens that URL in it.

Example 3: Register the new browser

# first import the module
import webbrowser

# then make a url variable
url = "https://www.geeksforgeeks.org"

# getting path
chrome_path = r"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"

# First registers the new browser
webbrowser.register('chrome', None, 
                    webbrowser.BackgroundBrowser(chrome_path))

# after registering we can open it by getting its code.
webbrowser.get('chrome').open(url)

The output of using this command in the prompt is the same as given above but only the method is different.

Hence after executing it will open the chrome web browser.

There is one other method also for opening the browser using webbrowser in python. In this method, we don't have to write the whole script and interpret it to open the browsers. We could just use python shell to execute a single command (given below) to open up the browser (default one) with a specified URL.

The shell command is given as:-

python -m webbrowser -t "https://www.geeksforgeeks.org"

Hence we saw two different methods and explained to them how to open a web browser using python scripts.

harshkumarchoudhary144

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Article Tags :

• Python
• python-utility
• python-modules

Practice Tags :

• python