CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosshellwebbrowser
beroe
beroe

Reputation: 12316

Possible to pipe stdout directly to web browser?

I have some python utilities that generate HTML output. Instead of saving to a temporary file, and opening that in a web browser, I would like to be able to just redirect the output to the browser to preview it. For example, something like:

myscript.py | open /Applications/Safari.app

Is there any way to do such a thing? I am on OS X.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 2907

Answers (3)

k0pernikus
k0pernikus

Reputation: 66677

curl https://www.google.com | bcat

If you can have ruby on your system you may install bcat:

gem install bcat

Make sure you have the gem binary folder in your path, e.g.:

/home/{YOUR_USER_NAME}/.local/share/gem/ruby/{VERSION}/bin

in my case that would be:

/home/philipp/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.0.0/bin

Then you'll have bcat command at your disposal in which you can pipe in html and which will then open your browser as shown above.

Upvotes: 3

Max O
Max O

Reputation: 1027

open utility in macOS is quite powerful, check man open. Although -f argument description mentions default text editor, it actually works with all apps. So for your case this should work:

myscript.py | open -f -a safari

Unfortunately open just saves your input to a temporary .txt file and browser treats it as plain text so you can't render html that way.

Upvotes: 0

user149341
user149341

Reputation:

About the best I can come up with is encoding the HTML as a data: URL and making a browser open it:

import webbrowser, base64

html = "<b>hello world</b>"
b64url = "data:text/html;base64," + base64.b64encode(html)
webbrowser.get("safari").open(b64url)

However, this doesn't seem to work reliably for any browser other than Safari. I'm not sure how well it will work with large pages, either; the URL may eventually get too large to handle.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions