August 19, 2014

Automating menial Browser activity using Selenium

Author: tec at 8/19/2014 10:25:00 pm

Today I stumbled across a marvelous Framework called Selenium which does browser automation. It lets you programmatically control a web browser session which can be used for automating tests or controlling browser to perform menial works.

Here's a small snippet that I put together for myself just to try out selenium's python bindings. Yes, python is the language of my choice currently! :) Selenium binds of various languages are available on their official website at : http://www.seleniumhq.org/

What this script does is open a third party website: way2sms.com, log me in using my username, password and then send a message to any number of my choice. All of this is done programmatically! So all I've to do is fire up a console and enter my username, password, a mobile number and a message and selenium will handle the rest. Of course, this is just an example and one can use this to perform a variety of tasks, boring or otherwise.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from datetime import datetime

def send(username, password, mobile, message):
  
  driver = webdriver.Firefox()
  driver.get("http://site25.way2sms.com/content/index.html")

  driver.find_element_by_id("username").send_keys(username)
  driver.find_element_by_id("password").send_keys(password)
  driver.find_element_by_id("loginBTN").send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

  driver.execute_script("goToMain('s')")
  driver.execute_script("loadSMSPage('sendSMS')")

  frame = driver.find_element_by_id("frame")
  driver.switch_to_frame(frame)

  driver.find_element_by_id("mobile").send_keys(mobile)
  driver.find_element_by_id("message").send_keys(message)
  driver.find_element_by_id("Send").send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

  driver.switch_to_default_content()
  driver.close()

You can install selenium python binding using:

sudo easy_install selenium

Since I hacked this together in hurry, it doesn't include any comments but the code should be self explanatory and easy to follow because all it does is find a web element (like an input box or a button) and send it a sequence of keys ( string value of action keys like RETURN ).

Automating tasks on a third party website requires a bit of inspection of web elements and javascripts, even stylesheet at times. This can be done using built-in web inspectors available with most of the modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox. As of now Firebug is the inspector of my choice.

Keep automating!

1 comment:

Unknown18 July 2018 at 15:00

I am reading your post from some days and they are good this is the first time I comment. So all the best for your future post.

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