Best practice for opening an external URL?

DrChrisHeard

Hello, all! Apologies if this is in the wrong category. Been working with Twine for a while but new to the forum. I am seeking advice on the best way to open an external URL in a new tab/window. My stories are built in Twine 2.0.11 standalone and Harlowe 1.2.2.

(1) I know that I can use something like

(link: 'foo')[(open-url: 'http://foo.bar')]

to accomplish this. I was having some problems with unexpected text showing up in the passage, but on another thread greyelf showed me how to deal with that. (Thanks!)

(2) I also know that I can use standard HTML

<a href='http://foo.bar' target='_blank'>foo</a>

markup to do this, but I don’t know how to pass story variables into the URL or even if that’s possible. If I understand correctly, I cannot just use

<a href=$foo>

or something along those lines because Harlowe doesn’t parse the text inside HTML tags as Harlowe/Twine markup. (Is that right?)

Any help/advice along these lines would be appreciated. My “stories” are actually interactive lessons for college students, delivered inside a closed system where using the standard browser back button is problematic, so sending the link into a new tab/window is pretty important to avoid disrupting the user experience.

(Also: why does the forum software add unwanted semicolons near quotation marks?)

TheMadExile

You should be able to "print" the markup you want. For example:

(print: '<a href="http://foo.bar' + $query + '" target="_blank">foo</a>')

I can't recommend the (link:) variant, at least in Harlowe 1.2.2, as (open-url:) returns the window object when invoked—which gets injected into the page as the string [object Window]. I'd probably consider (open-url:) returning anything a bug—I can't think of a useful reason for it to do so, at any rate.