why doesnt followhyperlink open website + shell syntax solution explanation

[excellol]

1) this works:

thisworkbook.FollowHyperlink "https://www.google.com"

(remove the space after h)

but not this:

ThisWorkbook.FollowHyperlink "https://www.bi.go.id/en/statistik/indikator/IndONIA.aspx"

instead i got either one of these errors:

why is this so? both are normal websites so theoretically it should work?


2) i found this solution on stackoverflow which is able to open my website
Shell "explorer ""Indicator"""

could u explain the syntax to me? i tried googling for the shell syntax explanation but they werent helpful for my context
what does 'explorer' refer to? im sure that it isn't explorer.exe, as the code opened the website in my default browser which is firefox
why are there double quotes ("") for the website?
lastly, i used the shell code above for each of the 4 websites that i want to open. however, the websites did not open in the order of the shell code. is there a way to make them open in order?

for eg
Shell "explorer ""website1"""
Shell "explorer ""website2"""
Shell "explorer ""website3"""

firefox opened websites 1 and 3 followed by website 2

 

[RoryA]

It’s the variable that has the URL in, yes.

 

[excellol]

It’s the variable that has the URL in, yes.

but why do we need a second & after add ?

 

[RoryA]

Because you need to concatenate another quotation mark onto the end of the URL.

 

[excellol]

just to make sure if i understood the code. vba interprets this code

Shell "explorer """ & add & """"

as Shell "explorer "add""

am i right?

 

[RoryA]

No - replace add with the URL that was assigned to add.

 

[excellol]

i understand that add is the variable with the url stored in it.

then comes my next question:

add ="http://www.mrexcel.com"

since the url in the add variable already is surrounded with quotation marks, the final version of the code would be

Shell "explorer ""http://www.mrexcel.com"""

where the actual url is surrounded by double quotation marks. am i right?

 

[RoryA]

The text in the add variable is not surrounded by quotation marks. The quotes in this line:

add = "http://www.mrexcel.com"

are there to tell the compiler that it's a literal string, they are not part of the actual text. That's why the next code line has to add actual quotes around the text value of the variable. You might find it less confusing to use Chr(34) to create a quotation mark like this:

Shell "explorer " & Chr(34) & add & chr(34)

 

[excellol]

ok i understand now.

add = "http://www.mrexcel.com"
Shell "explorer " & add

do u know the reason why does this code work for simple websites but not for "complicated" websites like this? https://www.bi.go.id/en/statistik/indikator/IndONIA.aspx