Open url from text file in browser when there is text in the same line of the url

[ghost]

I am using this to open urls from a file in the browser

grep -n '' "filename" | fzf -m --reverse | xargs -d '\n' firefox

It works well when I only have the url in a line. The problem is that in that file I have the url with more text. I use it for bookmarks and it looks like this per line:

"Bookmark Name" | https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/ | +tag1 +tag2 | [Description-optional]

What I want is to open only the url and not the entire line in the browser. I have searched before posting this, so help would be appreciated.

[hamvocke]

I've written a small script that tries to do something very similar to what you're describing here. Maybe this is helpful.

My solution uses fzf's "Field Index Expressions" to pull this off (see man fzf or check it out here). It might not be quite what you're looking for given you're passing the --multi flag.

To solve your particular problem, you could try to sanitize fzf's output with cut before passing it over to firefox. Something like this might work (assuming the URLs are always in the second field of each line):

cat yourfile.txt | fzf --multi --reverse | cut -d '|' -f 2 | xargs firefox

[LangLangBart]

• with the --delimiter flag it can be easier, it defines how the fields are separated, in this case an escaped | (pipe) character
  • the default delimiter seems to be defined like this \S+\s*

fzf/src/tokenizer.go

Line 147 in 76364ea

// AWK-style (\S+\s*)

• the {+} is an additional placeholder flag to get all selected lines
• become action was introduced in 0.38.0
• open a url in your default browser with open, the command may differ on Linux/Windows

cat yourfile.txt | fzf --multi --reverse --delimiter '\|'  --bind 'enter:become:open {+2}'

[ghost]

Thanks @hamvocke and @LangLangBart. Both of the solutions work but I also need this:

• Make - the delimiter instead of | because I am using that delimiter right now. The problem is that some urls also have - and changing to --delimiter \ - does not work.
• Maintain opened the terminal after opening any url. Currently, with those commands, after opening one url the terminal exits fzf. I would like to continue with it open to search more urls instead of having to reopen it.
• Open the url no matter the exact position. There are some of my urls that are not in the second position, so none of those commands work in this case.

Apart from this, I do not know if there is any shortcut to select all the input in the search bar of fzf (like ctrl+a). Any idea?

[LangLangBart]

Open the url no matter the exact position

You can use grep to search for a typical URL with a regex and pass the found URLs to fzf. Disadvantage: You lose the context of some bookmarks.

grep -Eo 'https?://[^ ]*' <YOUR FILE> | fzf --multi --reverse --bind 'ctrl-a:toggle-all' --bind 'enter:execute-silent:open {+}'

[LangLangBart]

• this could be an alternative using the {+f} placeholder
  • see man fzf for details

grep -n '' <YOUR FILE> | fzf --multi --reverse --bind 'ctrl-a:toggle-all' --bind "enter:execute-silent:grep -Eo 'https?://[^ ]*' {+f} | xargs open"

[ghost]

The first command works but, as you say, I lose a ton of context.

The second one does no open anything. When I press ENTER nothing happens (no url is opened).

[LangLangBart]

• redirecting the errors to /tmp/err might shed some light, why the second command won't work

grep -n '' <YOUR FILE> | fzf --multi --reverse --bind 'ctrl-a:toggle-all' --bind "enter:execute-silent:(grep -Eo 'https?://[^ ]*' {+f} | xargs open) 2>/tmp/err"

cat /tmp/err

[ghost]

I have used that command and then cat /tmp/err but nothing is created (I receive this message: cat: /tmp/err: No such file or directory).