You can automate a web browser with Python using the selenium module. The selenium module lets you control Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and other browsers.
First, what is selenium?
What is Selenium?
Selenium automates web browsers. There are bindings for Python, that lets you use selenium using Python code. The web browser can run on the same computer or remote (another computer or mobile device).
Mainly it is for automating web applications for testing, but is certainly not limited to just that. The selenium module lets you
- do automated testing
- simulate web surfing
- do web scraping
- do usability testing
Before trying selenium, you should know the basics of Python
To use selenium, you should install both the selenium module and the selenium web driver.
Example
The program below starts the Chromium browser from a Python script, types the website url itself in the browser and loads it. Finally it outputs the html source of the web page.
from selenium import webdriver
import time
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')
options.add_argument("--test-type")
options.binary_location = "/usr/bin/chromium"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)
driver.get('https://python.org')
html = driver.page_source
print(html)
(from selenium get source)
If you prefer to use Firefox, just change the driver to firefox. Make sure you have the web driver installed otherwise it will not work.
# coding=utf-8
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("https://python.org")
Keep in mind that the version of the web driver must be intended for the version of the web browser. A new web browser version, means you must update the driver.
Once you have selenium working on your computer, you can do anything you can do on the web from Python,fully automated, and more like take screenshots or execute javascript on the same page..
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