Web Driver Methods in Selenium Python

27 July 2024

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Selenium’s Python Module is built to perform automated testing with Python. Selenium Python bindings provides a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. To open a webpage using Selenium Python, checkout – Navigating links using get method – Selenium Python. Just being able to go to places isn’t terribly useful. What we’d really like to do is to interact with the pages, or, more specifically, the HTML elements within a page. There are multiple strategies to find an element using Selenium, checkout – Locating Strategies. Selenium WebDriver offers various useful methods to control the session, or in other words, browser. For example, adding a cookie, pressing back button, navigating among tabs, etc.

This article revolves around Various WebDriver Methods and functions one can use to manipulate DOM and various other actions one can do with Selenium WebDriver in Python.

How to create an WebDriver Object ?

To create object of WebDriver, import WebDriver class from docs and create a object based on different Web Browser and Capabilities. After this one can use this object to perform all the operations of Webdriver. For example, to create object of Firefox, one can use –

# import webdriver
from selenium import webdriver
   
# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
  

Arguments –
Webdriver accepts various arguments to manipulate various features –

desired_capabilities – A dictionary of capabilities to request when
starting the browser session. Required parameter.
browser_profile – A selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_profile.FirefoxProfile object.
Only used if Firefox is requested. Optional.
proxy – A selenium.webdriver.common.proxy.Proxy object. The browser session will
be started with given proxy settings, if possible. Optional.
keep_alive – Whether to configure remote_connection.RemoteConnection to use
HTTP keep-alive. Defaults to False.
file_detector – Pass custom file detector object during instantiation. If None,
then default LocalFileDetector() will be used.
options – instance of a driver options.Options class

How to use Webdriver in Selenium ?

After one has created an object of Webdriver, open a webpage, and perform various other methods using below syntax and examples. one can perform various actions such as opening a new tab closing a tab, closing a window, adding a cookie, executing javascript, etc.

Project Example –

Let’s try to implement WebDriver methods using https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ and play around with using javascript through selenium python.
Program –

# import webdriver
from selenium import webdriver
  
# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
  
# get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")
  
# write script
script = "alert('Alert via selenium')"
  
# generate a alert via javascript
driver.execute_async_script(script)

Output –
Browser generates alert as verified below –