Opening Web Internet Location Files on Ubuntu

As part of my effort to make myself and my workflows more “cross-platform friendly,” I’ve been revisiting certain aspects of how I do things. One of the things I’m reviewing is how I capture—and later review—posts or articles on the web. On macOS, I would run an AppleScript that generated a .webloc file (aka an Internet location file). This is an XML file that macOS understands. However, Linux doesn’t natively understand these files, so today I came up with a solution to reading .webloc files with Ubuntu and Firefox.

The solution to the file involves the use of xmllint, a tool that you can install on Ubuntu as part of the “libxml2-utils” package. Using xmllint, you can easily extract a single XML element from an XML file—and .webloc files are just XML files. For the sake of illustration, here’s the contents of a .webloc file generated on macOS:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>URL</key>
    <string>http://blog.fntlnz.wtf/post/systemd-nspawn/</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Using xmllint, you can extract the URL value, and then pass that value to the browser of your choice (Firefox, in my case). Here’s a quick script that I concocted that will extract the URL using xmllint, then pass that URL to Firefox:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Test to be sure user supplied a parameter; error if not
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Please supply the name of a .webloc file to open"
    exit
fi

# Extract URL from webloc file
URL=$(xmllint --xpath "string(//string)" "$1")

# Open $URL in Firefox
/usr/bin/firefox $URL &

The trick here, apparently, is the --xpath parameter to xmllint. I don’t fully understand the syntax yet, but it looks for the element named “string” (which, in the case of a .webloc file, is the URL of the site). If the element had been named “weburl”, then the syntax would change to --xpath "string(//weburl)".

Using this script, I can now easily pass in the name of a .webloc file created on macOS and open it in Firefox on my Ubuntu laptop. The script is also easily modified to work on macOS itself as well; just replace the line calling Firefox with the open command instead. (I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)

The next step for me is to create a .desktop file that references this script, then modify the Ubuntu environment so that double-clicking on a .webloc file invokes the script (which, in turn, invokes Firefox). Once I’ve figured that out, I’ll post something here. Until then, enjoy!

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