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I am creating a simple search engine for my university site using Selenium and Tkinter. My code creates the GUI and produces URL links to queries entered into the search box. Is it possible to have these produced URLs as clickable hyperlinks within the GUI? If so, how would I go about doing this?

import selenium.webdriver as webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from tkinter import *



def get_results(search_term, num_results = 10):
    url = "https://www.startpage.com"
    options = Options()
    options.add_argument('--headless')
    options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')  
    chromedriver = "chromedriver.exe"
    args = ["hide_console", ]
    browser = webdriver.Chrome(chromedriver, service_args = args, options = 
options) 
    browser.get(url)
    browser.set_window_position(0, 0)
    browser.set_window_size(0, 0)
    search_box = browser.find_element_by_id("query")
    search_box.send_keys(search_term)
    search_box.submit()
    try:
        links = 
browser.find_elements_by_xpath("//ol[@class='web_regular_results']//h3//a")
    except:
        links = browser.find_elements_by_xpath("//h3//a")
    results = []
    for link in links[:num_results]:
        href = link.get_attribute("href")
        print(href)
        results.append(href)
        results.append(href)
        mlabel2 = Label(mGui, text = href).pack()
    browser.close()

    return results



def search_query():
    mtext = ment.get()
    user_search = get_results(mtext + " site:essex.ac.uk")

    return

response = get_results
mGui = Tk()
ment = StringVar()
mGui.geometry('640x640+0+0')
mGui.title('Essex University Search')
mlabel = Label(mGui, text = 'Essex University Search', font = ("arial", 40, 
"bold"), fg = "steelblue").pack()
mbutton = Button(mGui, text = 'Search', command = search_query, font = 
("arial", 10), fg = 'white', bg = 'steelblue').pack()
mEntry = Entry(mGui, textvariable = ment).pack()
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  • 1
    Are you looking to make a single label or text work like a hyperlink, or to embed hyperlinks into a larger label or text? Commented Mar 18, 2018 at 21:37
  • I am looking to embed hyperlinks into the URLs that are placed within the label. I have set the maximum number of URLs produced to 10 Commented Mar 18, 2018 at 21:40
  • So you want a label that looks like one of these comments—where most of the text is plain text, but your name and the edit after your own comment look like link and trigger some code when clicked? That's a lot harder than just making a whole label look and act like a hyperlink. Commented Mar 18, 2018 at 21:43
  • With a text instead of a label, it's still hard—but there are tools that do most of the hard work for you. Commented Mar 18, 2018 at 21:44
  • would it be easier if each url was split into its own text box instead of a label? I have achieved placing each url into its own text box but just chose a label as it looked neater. However if it is possible to make each text box look and act like a hyperlink then I will do it this way. My apologies for making it confusing, i'm not very experienced with Tkinter and GUI's in general haha Commented Mar 18, 2018 at 21:47

1 Answer 1

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If you just want to make a whole Label look and work like a hyperlink, this is pretty easy. I'll just do a dumb webbrowser.open instead of talking to a webdriver, so this can run without any extra libraries or configuration.

from tkinter import *
import webbrowser

root = Tk()
link = Label(root, text="http://stackoverflow.com", fg="blue", cursor="hand2")
link.pack()
link.bind("<Button-1>", lambda event: webbrowser.open(link.cget("text")))
root.mainloop()

But if you want to embed hyperlinks in the middle of text within a Label, that's hard. There's no easy way to style part of a Label different from the rest. And when you get that <Button-1>, you have to manually figure out where in the string it hit. And I'm not aware of any libraries that wrap this up and make it easier.

If you're willing to use a Text instead of Label, on the other hand, the support is already there, and wrapping it up isn't that hard. Borrowing the Hyperlink Manager out of the tkinter book:

from functools import partial
from tkinter import *
import webbrowser
from tkHyperlinkManager import HyperlinkManager

root = Tk()
text = Text()
text.pack()
hyperlink = HyperlinkManager(text)
text.insert(INSERT, "Hello, ")
text.insert(INSERT, "Stack Overflow",
            hyperlink.add(partial(webbrowser.open, "http://stackoverflow.com")))
text.insert(INSERT, "!\n\n")
text.insert(INSERT, "And here's ")
text.insert(INSERT, "a search engine",
            hyperlink.add(partial(webbrowser.open, "http://duckduckgo.com")))
text.insert(INSERT, ".")

root.mainloop()

Of course you could wrap up the partial(webbrowser.open, url) in a method so you can just call hyperlink.add('http://stackoverflow.com'), or even wrap the text.insert in there so you can just call hyperlink.insert(INSERT, 'Stack Overflow', 'http://stackoverflow.com'), but I left the simple interface of tkHyperlinkManager alone to make it easier to understand what it's doing.

And as you can from the pretty short and simple tkHyperlinkManager code, what it's doing isn't all that difficult. You just wrap each hyperlink in a tag and insert that in place of the raw text, and you get the tag back with each event, so you can easily look up what you want to do for that specific tag.

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3 Comments

I was going to underline the hyperlink in the Label, but it turns out that's not hard, but not as trivial as I remember, so I left it out.
thank you for your help, I think I will take the text box approach :)
"Borrowing the Hyperlink Manager out of the tkinter book:" the link to that book is dead making the 2nd answer useless!

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