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I find it very useful to be able to include hyperlinks in the debug output of my test suite like this:


The above command prints the quoted URL to the output window as a hyperlink. It can be CTRL-clicked and the specified HTML file will open in a new IDE tab.

In itself, this is very valuable. However, my suite generates dozens of potentially useful HTML logfiles and during debugging the Output Window becomes a sea of blue escaped URLs. I want to hide the URL and show some alternate CTRL-clickable text. The following doesn't work but should illustrate what I am trying to do:

OutputDebugStringA("<a href=\"file://c:/path/index.html\">Index</a>")

Is something like this possible?

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up vote 0 down vote accepted

You're basically at the mercy of however the output window is implemented; I'm guessing it's just hotting up things that look like URLs and probably doesn't support HTML. Maybe you can develop a Visual Studio add-in that behaves similar to the output window that supports HTML.

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