Open a file without getOpenFileName?

Question

is there a way to open files without using QFileDialog.getOpenFileName parameter? The thing is, I have a some buttons that upon clicking them, a notepad will pop up in which you can type anything into the notepad. Then, you can save whatever you wrote in that notepad as a text file. What I want to do is, if I click the button again, I will reopen the file that I had previously edited via the notepad and can continue typing where I left off. However, I don't want to use getOpenFileName. Would it be possible to open a file without using this functionality? Below is my attempt but my if statement keeps evaluating to be false. If anyone could help that would be great. Thanks!

    #Testing if the file already exists
    if(os.path.exists("~/Desktop/" +self.fileName + ".txt")):
        f = open(self.fileName + ".txt", 'r')
        filedata = f.read()
        self.text.setText(filedata)
        f.close()
    #Opens a new notepad if there wasn't a previous fileconstructed
    else:
        self.textBox = textBoxWindow(self.fileName)
        self.textBox.show()

MadeOfAir · Answer 1 · 2013-09-19T11:49:13.153

If you are on Winsows (you said the word Notepad), you can use the subprocess module to open any file with whatever program currently associated with the file type as follows:

import subprocess

self.filename = r'C:\test.txt'
subprocess.call(['start', self.filename], shell=True)

But the shell=True argument is kinda dangerous, especially of the filename comes as an input.

you can use the webbrowser module too, though not supported use of it I guess:

import webbrowser
webbrowser.open(self.filename)

Open a file without getOpenFileName?

1 Answers1