How can I dynamically submit commands to Selenium through Python?

Question

Since Python is mostly a runtime language, would it be possible through Selenium to have something like 'wait for developer input'. In my case it would be way more effective to test code live on a web page (like offset or scrolling) than to relaunch the website each time the code does not work as expected.

Something like

(...)
driver.get(url)

while True:
    command = wait_for_python_code()
    # developer inputs 'elem = driver.find_element_by_class_name('myclass')\nprint(elem.text)'
    # selenium prints content of myclass on the go

So basically dynamically allow the user (developer) to type any arbitrary python code, that will be fed to selenium.

NB: I am not looking for an answer to get the class_name provided by the user input, but the whole code block that could be anything (and this is for internal use so no worries about security flaws)

John Gordon · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-09 18:54:34Z

2

You can use the input() function to accept keyboard input.

If you just want to find an element with a given class, you can use this:

while True:
    klass = input("Enter the element class name: ")
    elem = driver.find_element_by_class_name(klass)
    print(elem.text)

However if you want to allow the user to type any arbitrary python code, it is a lot more complicated.

answered Jun 9, 2020 at 18:54

John Gordon

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1 Comment

Antonin GAVREL Over a year ago

I am looking for the latter one sorry!

AlexJerez · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-09 19:00:45Z

0

One very handy approach to debugging a Selenium script is to return the driver object to your prompt, then you can use the driver as you would in a script, but you have access to it in your interactive python shell:

# mycode.py

from selenium import webdriver
import time

def get_driver():
    options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)
    return driver

You can now open a python shell and run this code manually

> from mycode import get_driver
> driver = get_driver

You can now debug the driver as needed:

> driver.get('https://python.org')
> driver.find_element_by_class_name('div#ICanDoAnyThingIWant')

# etc ...

answered Jun 9, 2020 at 19:00

AlexJerez

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