Selenium in Python

Presented by Christie Ewen at NYC PyLadies event hosted at Flatiron Health: http://www.meetup.com/NYC-PyLadies/events/175278962/

Transcript

1. Selenium in Python Web scraping and automation by Christie Ewen
2. The Sims Online In-game employment
3. Why Selenium? • WYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get • Cross Browser testing • Web scraping / automation • For the example I’m going to show you, you don’t need to know the internals of Wordpress especially out-of-the-box websites
4. How to get started • https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=52wxGESwQSA • Install Selenium ◦ “pip install selenium” • “from selenium import webdriver” • Play with sample code ◦ https://github.com/paulproteus/python-scraping- code-samples
5. Problems: • Errors • Can’t find element • Install Chromedriver • Set env variables ◦ driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=" /path/to/chromedriver") • Experiment with Firefox and Chrome to inspect HTML element Solutions:
6. Helpful Links • https://sites.google.com/a/chromium. org/chromedriver/getting-started • http://selenium-python.readthedocs. org/en/latest/locating-elements.html • http://www.w3schools. com/XPath/xpath_syntax.asp