extending urlize in django

Question

the urlize function from django.utils.html converts urls to clickable links. My problem is that I want to append a target="_blank" into the "< href..>", so that I open this link in a new tab. Is there any way that I can extend the urlize function to receive an extra argument? or should I make a custom filter using regexes to do this stuff? Is this efficient?

Answer 1

There is no capability in the built-in urlize() to do this. Due to Django's license you can copy the code of django.utils.html.urlize and django.template.defaultfilters.urlize into your project or into a separate app and use the new definitions instead.

Answer 2

You shouldn't add target="_blank" to your links, it's deprecated. Users should decide themselves if where they want to open a link.

You can still open the link with unobtrusive JavaScript like so (using jQuery):

$('.container a').click(function(e){e.preventDefault();window.open(this.href);});

That said, you could write your own filter, but you'd have to copy a lot of code from django.utils.html.urlize, not really DRY.

Answer 3

Hi,

You can add a custom filter, as descibed in:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/howto/custom-template-tags/#howto-custom-template-tags

I used this one:

def url_target_blank(text):
    return text.replace('<a ', '<a target="_blank" ')
url_target_blank = register.filter(url_target_blank)

Example of usage:

{{ post_body|urlize|url_target_blank }}

Works fine for me :)