Launch web page from my application

Question

Ok, this probably has a really simple answer, but I've never tried to do it before: How do you launch a web page from within an app? You know, "click here to go to our FAQ", and when they do it launches their default web browser and goes to your page. I'm working in C/C++ in Windows, but if there's a broader, more portable way to do it I'd like to know that, too.

Answer 1

#include <windows.h>

void main()
{
   ShellExecute(NULL, "open", "http://yourwebpage.com",
            NULL, NULL, SW_SHOWNORMAL);
}

Answer 2

I believe you want to use the ShellExecute() function which should respect the users choice of default browser.

Answer 3

Please read the docs for ShellExecute closely. To really bulletproof your code, they recommend initializing COM. See the docs here, and look for the part that says "COM should be initialized as shown here". The short answer is to do this (if you haven't already init'd COM):

CoInitializeEx(NULL, COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED | COINIT_DISABLE_OLE1DDE)

Answer 4

For the record (since you asked for a cross-platform option), the following works well in Linux:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void launch(const std::string &url)
{
  std::string browser = getenv("BROWSER");
  if(browser == "") return;

  char *args[3];
  args[0] = (char*)browser.c_str();
  args[1] = (char*)url.c_str();
  args[2] = 0;

  pid_t pid = fork();
  if(!pid)
    execvp(browser.c_str(), args);
}

Use as:

launch("http://example.com");

Answer 5

You can use ShellExecute function. Sample code:

ShellExecute( NULL, "open", "http://stackoverflow.com", "", ".", SW_SHOWDEFAULT );