opening standard stream in google-chrome

Question

I have a program that creates a html file as standard output. To view it in vim I just need to:

$ foo2html foo | vim -

vim will be launched with stdin read-in for viewing. Once I close vim the command will return.

Is there some combination of command-line switches that will make google-chrome do this?

Answer 1

Just use data URIs:

# google-chrome
echo '<h1>hello</h1>' | google-chrome "data:text/html;base64,$(base64 -w 0)"

# firefox (it will not automatic open since version 89, you must go to url and press enter)
echo '<h1>hello</h1>' | firefox "data:text/html;base64,$(base64 -w 0)"

# chromium
echo '<h1>hello</h1>' | chromium "data:text/html;base64,$(base64 -w 0)"

# opera
echo '<h1>hello</h1>' | opera "data:text/html;base64,$(base64 -w 0)"

# Default browser (in debian systems)
echo '<h1>hello</h1>' | x-www-browser "data:text/html;base64,$(base64 -w 0)"

The command base64 is available from coreutils on debian like systems

sudo apt-get install coreutils

If you not have coreutils installed or you cannot install new packages, you could use the python module base64 (virtually any distro has python)

echo '<h1>hello</h1>' | google-chrome "data:text/html;base64,$(python -mbase64)"