Getting started with Selenium in python

Remarks#

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a library of commands to help a programmer interface with a browser like a real user.

Things that Selenium does:

Finding element(s) in a webpage’s html

• Finds a single element:

  • driver.find_element_by_css_selector("css.selector.of.element") CSS Selector help
  • driver.find_element_by_xpath("//xpath//of//element") XPATH help
  • driver.find_element_by_name("name_of_element")
  • driver.find_element_by_id("id_of_element")
  • driver.find_element_by_partial_link_text("element_link_text")
  • driver.find_element_by_class_name("class_name_of_element")
  • driver.find_element_by_tag_name("tag_name_of_element")

• Finds a list of elements:

  • driver.find_elements_by_css_selector("css.selector.of.elements")
  • driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//xpath//of//elements")
  • driver.find_elements_by_name("name_of_elements")
  • driver.find_elements_by_partial_link_text("elements_link_text")
  • driver.find_elements_by_class_name("class_name_of_elements")
  • driver.find_elements_by_tag_name("tag_name_of_elements")

• Official documentation: selenium-python read the docs

Interact with elements:

“method” represents any of the above methods to find an element or list of elements.

• click function:

  • driver.find_element_by_method.click()

• send_keys function:

  • driver.find_element_by_method.send_keys("text") sends the String “text” to the element found.
  • driver.find_element_by_method.send_keys(KeyCode.UP) sends the KeyCode for the up arrow key to the element found.

Basic python Selenium

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome()  # Creates a new chromedriver instance
driver.get("https://www.python.org/")  # Go to https://www.python.org/
# Sends the text "python" to the text search box
driver.find_element_by_id("id-search-field").send_keys("python")
# Click on the search button
driver.find_element_by_css_selector("button[type=\"submit\"]").click()

Basic Selenium testcase

This is a basic example of a Selenium testcase using the python Unittest library

from selenium import webdriver
import unittest

class SeleniumTest(Unittest.testcase):

    def setUp(self):
        self.driver = webdriver.Chrome()
        self.driver.implicitly_wait(30)
        
    def test(self):
        self.driver.get("https//www.google.com")
        self.driver.find_element_by_id("lst-ib").send_keys("python")
        self.driver.find_element_by_css_selector("span[class=\"sbico\"]").click()

    def tearDown(self):
        self.driver.quit()