Selenium is a powerful tool for controlling a web browser through the program. It is functional for all browsers, works on all major OS and its scripts are written in various languages i.e Python, Java, C#, etc, we will be working with Python. Mastering Selenium will help you automate your day to day tasks like controlling your tweets, Whatsapp texting, and even just googling without actually opening a browser in just 15-30 lines of python code. The limits of automation are endless with selenium.
Installation
1.1 Selenium Bindings in Python
Selenium Python bindings provide a convenient API to access Selenium Web Driver like Firefox,Chrome,etc.
Pip install Selenium
1.2 Web Drivers
Selenium requires a web driver to interface with the chosen browser. Web drivers is a package to interact with a web browser. It interacts with the web browser or a remote web server through a wire protocol which is common to all. You can check out and install the web drivers of your browser choice.
Chrome: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads
Firefox: https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases
Safari: https://webkit.org/blog/6900/webdriver-support-in-safari-10/
Getting Started
Python
from selenium import webdriver # For using sleep function because selenium# works only when the all the elements of the# page is loaded.import time from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keysfrom selenium.webdriver.common.by import By# Creating an instance webdriverbrowser = webdriver.Firefox()# Let's the user see and also load the elementtime.sleep(2) login = browser.find_elements(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="doc"]/div[1]/div/div[1]/div[2]/a[3]')# using the click function which is similar to a click in the mouse.login[0].click()print("Login in Twitter")user = browser.find_elements(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="login-dialog-dialog"]/div[2]/div[2]/div[2]/form/div[1]/input')# Enter User Nameuser[0].send_keys('USER-NAME')user = browser.find_element(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="login-dialog-dialog"]/div[2]/div[2]/div[2]/form/div[2]/input')# Reads password from a text file because# saving the password in a script is just silly.with open('test.txt', 'r') as myfile: Password = myfile.read().replace('\n', '')user.send_keys(Password)LOG = browser.find_elements(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="login-dialog-dialog"]/div[2]/div[2]/div[2]/form/input[1]')LOG[0].click()print("Login Successful")time.sleep(5)elem = browser.find_element(By.XPATH, "q")elem.click()elem.clear()elem.send_keys("Geeks for Lazyroar ")# using keys to send special KEYSelem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)print("Search Successful")# closing the browserbrowser.close() |
Dissecting the code
The above script is for logging into twitter and searching for Lazyroar for Lazyroar handle. So let’s see how it works: 1. Opening the browser 2. Creating a browser instance and using the .get function to connect the website. 3. Finding the element this can be anything finding the input box or a button and using the selenium function like click(), send_keys(), etc to interact with the element. 4. Closing the browser As of now you must have realized this automation script works in an
iterative
manner of finding an element and interacting with it. There are various ways of finding an element in the web page, you just right click and inspect element and copy element either by name, css selector or xpath.
Well that’s basically it using this you can create a custom automated script for every single website or a universal one for all your social media which automates all your actions. There is no limit to automation and the above is just an example to get you guys started.So happy coding !
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This article is contributed by
Pradhvan Bisht
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