Creating a cross-platform url file

Yes it can! Depending on your platform you might be familiar with these file types, which when clicked, open the given URL in a browser window

So it is possible natively, but often can be difficult to work with in practice. I’ve always wanted to have an easy, cross-platform way to do this.

It turns out this is possible with modern web standards! No matter which system, we can always count on HTML.

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url='https://google.com'" />

it will open up as a normal html file, then perform a redirect. The destination in this case would be https://google.com

Next steps?

Taking this one step further, I wrote a script which will allow regular URLs to be mapped into their respective URL files. It would be run like

% python3 create-url-file.py 'https://google.com'

google.com.html

The code

Note that if a portion of the url is not safe for use in a filename, it will just be replaced with a double underscore, __.

import sys
import re
import os

def sanitize_filename(url: str) -> str:
    # Remove the scheme (http, https) and replace non-filename characters with '__'
    sanitized = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9.-]', '__', url.replace('https://', '').replace('http://', ''))
    return sanitized + ".html"

def generate_meta_redirect(url: str):
    meta_tag = f'<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url=\'{url}\'" />\n'
    filename = sanitize_filename(url)
    
    with open(filename, 'w') as f:
        f.write(meta_tag)
    
    print(f"Meta redirect written to {filename}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        print("Usage: python3 script.py <URL>")
        sys.exit(1)
    
    url = sys.argv[1]
    generate_meta_redirect(url)

Creating a cross-platform url file

Can a URL exist as a file?

Next steps?

The code