How to use Selenium in Python Let’s get started now selenium is a module in Python that lets you automate scripts and do a whole bunch of stuff with your web browser and honestly it is a fascinating and very brief introduction to Selenium
I will cover how to install it, how to click, and how to enter text three very basic commands with selenium hopefully you guys will have a basic understanding of how selenium works.
The first thing is installing selenium what you guys going to be doing is you’re preference project interpreter, and then go ahead and add in selenium again.
This might work I’ve had a couple of errors with this but if you go ahead and just click selenium I’ll lowercase this a bit install package then you should go ahead and have selenium installed package selenium installed successfully.
However, if that does not work and you get an error go to your terminal and close it then refresh what you’re saying is very important here pip 3 or PIP.
Depending on whatever version of Python you have normally pip should work install Selenium so that is the first task is to ask for your password go ahead and put in your password and then after you do that it says already been old or disabled whatever requirement already satisfying.
Once you have that done second thing is to install a web driver selenium needs a web driver to work with your browser
How to install your very own?
Open a new tab in your Chrome or any browser that you’re using and search for just selenium and click on the first link selenium HQ or inside of this go to download and then scroll down for something known as third-party browser drivers okay every browser that we have we need a driver to use selenium.
install the latest release of Chrome driver now we see over here the latest release chrome driver 2.34 go ahead and choose whichever version you’re using Linux Mac Windows doesn’t really matter or actually it does depending on the platform that you have
It’s all about automation and Selenium web scraping debugging regular expressions excel word manipulation a whole bunch of . We have installed selenium that was our driver go ahead and unzip it and go back to PyCharm and if you go to your Python consult and expand this if you run from selenium import web driver if this command works you know that selenium has been installed
Go ahead and run that if it works fantastic if it doesn’t Stack Overflow is your best help alright so make sure this works make sure you have Chrome drivers sitting somewhere that you know the second thing or the second sort of function to be setting up our browser so go ahead and say browser is equal to web driver
It works for some people but inside the brackets I think you have to specify the path of your web driver so if you’re in a Mac say users slash your user name slash downloads slash chrome driver again if you’re on a Windows machine you’re probably have something like C colon double backslash something double back slash double back slash remember guys windows as double backslash Mac is forward slash command V let’s get it back hit enter as soon as you run this command you should see an chrome window up here at the very bottom of your screen chrome is being controlled by automated test software so this tells you that selenium is working this is our browser now if you want to open a link with selenium say browser dot and then say get passing a URL the URL I’m actually in a pass going to be the selenium HQorg URL so browser dog get pass an HTTP colon while cab WWE neom HQ or awesome hit enter and immediately you will see finding elements on the browser
So if you go and say browser dash find element browser there are multiple different find element functions you can do by ID by class name by link text by partial link text stuff. use a link text function to get the link we’re talking about over here download so go ahead and pass in download that returns us a selenium web driver object store that browser to find element by link text download and say LM is equal to browser to find element by link text download fantasticso this will store this download object inside of our LM variable.
Now there’s multiple different things we can do you can access different attributes of the LM property you can say LM text you can say LM dot maybe get an attribute LM get attribute we want the xref of it what’s the actual link we get it right over here you can access various actually boots like that or you LM not click there we go downloads appear fantastic so that is the simplest way to click you find an element you specify it you say LM not click and selenium will click on that object let’s say we want to go back to projects if you want to go back to projects will say LM is equal to browser now find element by link text pass in projects and then when I say LM dot click there we go and we’re back to projects fantastic so as you can see it’s very straight forward the last thing
how do we put in tags into a fuel as you guys can see search box we’re going to try to figure out how to put some text inside of this so let’s select this right click and inspect we’re trying to look at the property orther ID of this so as you can see it’s an input type is equal to text ID is equal to Q once we have the ID name we just have to access it so search bar is equal to browser find element by ID Q command is going to be give me one second over here send keys search bar dot send keys will allow us to populate that text field with whatever we want
So search for just download something simple hit enter and immediately download appears so send keys allows us to simulate the keyword typing click simulates a user clicking Pi auto GUI except with selenium the better thing is we can access specific HTML elements and we don’t have to worry about the X&Y coordinate of various things so this is a lot better for automation in browsers now once we have this entered let’s say we want to go ahead and hit the enter key we can say search bar dot send keys we need to access the specific special key of enter to do that we need to import Aicloudnet
Extra thing is going to be from selenium from selenium web driver common keys import keys once we have the special keys imported we can say search bar dot send keys and then pass in keys dot enter fantastic as you can see we got keys that enter key will be simulated and it searches with Google custom search awesome so that is selenium in a nutshell guys I know I might have rushed this a bit but hopefully all this made sense selenium again allows for automation in web browsers what that means is I can run Python scripts I can go to web pages I can fill out forms I can click on elements I can fill up text fields stuff here we will cover three main things we understood how to find elements using the find element function we understand how to click on elements by using escape all of them can be accessed by importing this and just saying keys are up keeps keys are down keys that escape stuff like that anyways fantastic job guys thanks so much for listening hopefully selenium made sense to you it’s a lot of fun play around with and write your own scripts if you have any questions let me know in comment section
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