Selenium is a widely-used Python library for automating web browsers. It allows developers to programmatically control browser actions such as clicking buttons, filling forms, navigating pages, and extracting data. Selenium is mainly used for web testing, web scraping, and automating repetitive web tasks. It supports multiple browsers and is highly reliable for simulating real user interactions, making it essential for QA engineers, data analysts, and automation enthusiasts.
Installation:
pip install selenium
Example usage:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
# Open Chrome browser
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.python.org")
print(driver.title)
# Find the search bar and type a query
search_box = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "q")
search_box.send_keys("asyncio")
driver.quit()
PyPI page: https://pypi.org/project/selenium/
GitHub page: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium
3 Project Ideas:
- Build a bot that automatically fills out online forms or surveys.
- Create a web scraper to collect product prices and availability from e-commerce sites.
- Develop automated tests for a website to ensure UI functionality and reliability.
Top comments (1)
If you wanna automate web scraping with Selenium in Python like a pro, there are a few key things to keep in mind. First off, ditch the old-school sleep calls and use WebDriverWait to handle dynamic content - trust me, it'll save you from waiting forever. If you’re dealing with JavaScript-heavy pages, use explicit waits or even execute some JavaScript directly to get things moving. Now, headless browsers are great, but watch out for the lack of visual feedback - it can mess with your debugging game. And if you're tackling AJAX requests or popups, don’t sweat it, Selenium's got your back with tools like WebDriverWait, switch_to.alert, and switch_to.frame() to help you interact smoothly.