Converting a string automatically into a link to a pdf document - string

Question

I've done some looking around in here and on the internet and it doesnt seem super obvious, but my question is can python using tkinter be used to automatically convert a text string into a link that loads a pdf from a certain direction
e.g. data '12345 Issue A' pops up in a text widget and is automatically converted to a link that when clicked opens up a pdf document.
Can this or can it not be done ?
In this case I'm wanting to be able to click 1931-125, 699-126 and 1851-127 and have each open up a pdf file of the same name. This is being used in a manufacturing environment and allows an assembler to click the fields and have all the documents they need to build a certain item

Answer 1

First off to apply formatting to parts of a Text widget you will need to understand about tags, in most cases you can probably just use the phrase of the link (ABC123) just remember that:
The name of a tag can be any string that does not contain white space or periods.
once you have a tag for the link there are two parts:
Formatting the tag to look and react like a link.
Applying the tag to the phrases in text.
The first one is really simple if you just want it to be blue and underlined and respond to being clicked:
def format_link(text_widget,tag,command):
text_widget.tag_config(tag,foreground="blue",underline=1)
text_widget.tag_bind(tag,"<Button-1>",command)#remember that the command will need to take an event argument
Although this could get more complicated if you want the cursor to change when hovering over or colour to change after clicking etc.
The second part is to apply this tag to the text automatically which I'm assuming means parse the text after it is inserted into the widget. This is also very simple by putting this answer in a loop so that it checks for every occurrence of the phrase:
def apply_tag(text_widget,phrase,tag,regexp=False):
countVar = tk.IntVar(text_widge)
idx = "1.0"
while idx:
idx = text_widget.search(phrase,idx, stopindex = "end",
count = countVar, regexp = regexp)
if idx:
end_idx = "%s + %sc" %(idx, countVar.get())
text_widget.tag_add(tag, idx, end_idx)
idx = end_idx
Then all that is left is defining the way to open the file in another program and then calling the two above functions, using os.system("open"...) to open files it could be as simple as:
def make_link(text,phrase,file_to_open):
def callback(event=None):
os.system("open %r"%file_to_open)#there are better ways of handling this
apply_tag(text,phrase,phrase)#uses phrase as tag
format_link(text,phrase,callback)
Although you might want to look at answers here or it's duplicate for alternatives for opening files.
after inserting the text into the widget, assuming you have some sort of list of phrases to turn into links, you can just loop over the phrases and call make_link for each one:
phrases = {"1931-125", "699-126", "1851-127"}
for s in phrases:
make_link(TEXT_W, s, s+".pdf") #make a link to same name with .pdf added to end.