Selenium Documentation
| Selenium Documentation | |
|---|---|
| Project Information | |
| Project Title | Selenium Documentation |
| Owner | Peter Jalbert |
| Start Date | |
| Deadline | |
| Primary Billing | |
| Notes | |
| Has project status | Active |
| Copyright © 2016 edegan.com. All Rights Reserved. | |
Selenium Web Driver is a framework often used for automated web application testing. It uses an API to launch a web browser and browse sites from the client's perspective. Popular Selenium bindings exist for Python, Java, Javascript, and other languages. This documentation covers Selenium Web Driver using Python3.
Contents
Installation
A full list of installation documentation can be found here.
This documentation assumes you have Python 3.6 or later installed. If you do not, visit the Python Download page.
From the command line, enter
pip install selenium
The Basics
A folder with tutorial code can be found on the RDP in:
E:\McNair\Software\Selenium Tutorial
Launching a Driver
The first step is to launch a driver. This is an object that has information on the current page including its url and web elements, and is the object you interact with to do any sort of navigation. First, import the webdriver:
from selenium import webdriver
Then, create an instance of the web driver. The RDP has bindings for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. The following will launch a web browser on Google Chrome.
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
The GET method is used to visit a website. The get() command in Selenium takes a string url.
driver.get("http://www.google.com")
From here, different methods can be used to interact with the page. Most interactions involve some type of exchange with a web element. Selenium comes with many different ways to locate specific elements. To see the attributes of the element you want to work with, it is often a good idea to visit that page on your own browser, right click on the element you want your program to interact with, and select INSPECT. This will bring up the developer console and display the HTML representation of that element. From there, you can use one of the following selectors that best matches what you need.
Selectors
Helpful Links
How to Download a file in Python with a URL
Selenium: Get Children Elements
Advanced
The folder for the Web Driver Executables can be found:
C:\SeleniumDriver
chromedriver.exe is an executable to launch Google Chrome, and geckodriver.exe is an executable to launch Mozilla Firefox. Any new drivers for different web browsers should be placed in this folder.
