Question

I know you can open files, browsers, and URLs in the Python GUI. However, I don’t know how to apply this to programs. For example, none of the below work. (The below are snippets from my growing chat bot program):

def browser():
    print('OPENING FIREFOX...')
    handle = webbroswer.get() # webbrowser is imported at the top of the file
    handle.open('http://youtube.com')
    handle.open_new_tab('http://google.com') 

and

def file():
    file = str(input('ENTER THE FILE\'S NAME AND EXTENSION:'))
    action = open(file, 'r')
    actionTwo = action.read()
    print (actionTwo)

These errors occur, in respect to the above order, but in individual runs:

OPENING FIREFOX...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Users/RCOMP/Desktop/Programming/Python Files/AI/COMPUTRON_01.py", line 202, in <module>
    askForQuestions()
  File "C:/Users/RCOMP/Desktop/Programming/Python Files/AI/COMPUTRON_01.py", line 64, in askForQuestions
    browser()
  File "C:/Users/RCOMP/Desktop/Programming/Python Files/AI/COMPUTRON_01.py", line 38, in browser
    handle = webbroswer.get()
NameError: global name 'webbroswer' is not defined
>>> 

ENTER THE FILE'S NAME AND EXTENSION:file.txt
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Users/RCOMP/Desktop/Programming/Python Files/AI/COMPUTRON_01.py", line 202, in <module>
    askForQuestions()
  File "C:/Users/RCOMP/Desktop/Programming/Python Files/AI/COMPUTRON_01.py", line 66, in askForQuestions
    file()
  File "C:/Users/RCOMP/Desktop/Programming/Python Files/AI/COMPUTRON_01.py", line 51, in file
    action = open(file, 'r')
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'file.txt'
>>> 

Am I handling this wrong, or can I just not use open() and webbrowser in a program?

Answer 1

You should read the errors and try to understand them – they are very helpful in this case – as they often are:

The first one says NameError: global name 'webbroswer' is not defined.
You can see here that webbrowser is spelled wrong in the code. It also tells you the line it finds the error (line 38)

The second one IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'file.txt' tells you that you’re trying to open a file that doesn’t exist. This does not work because you specified

    action = open(file, 'r')

which means that you’re trying to read a file. Python does not allow reading from a file that does not exist.