xpathwebdriver 0.3.0

Simpler selenium/webdriver API through a wrapper

A python wrapper for interacting with Selenium through XPath and CSS selectors. The main difference is that you can use use XPaths like:

//div/text()

Which will return you a string, something webdriver API makes more complicated.

Quick install

pip install xpathwebdriver

1. Install xpathwebdriver using pip.

2. Install google chrome.

3. Download chromedriver for your chrome version and install it in your path. https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads

4. That generally should work on a modern Linux System (not tested but should also work on other oses). Try example below

5. For image comparison pip install Pillow and install findimagedupes and imagemagick packages for your OS

Check “Installing Selenium” section for other browsers and details.

Example

from xpathwebdriver.simple_xpath_browser import SimpleXpathBrowser

browser = SimpleXpathBrowser()
browser.get_url('https://duckduckgo.com/')
browser.fill(".//*[@id='search_form_input_homepage']", 'xpathwebdriver\n')
# Using xpath that returns text
for idx, t in enumerate(browser.select_xpath('//div/text()')):
    print(idx, t)
# Using css selector which returns elements
for idx, elem in enumerate(browser.select_css('.result__title')):
    print(idx, elem.text)

Running xpathshell

Install pip install ipython

Then you can run the xpathshell command:

$ xpathshell
Python 3.7.5rc1 (default, Oct  8 2019, 16:47:45)
Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
IPython 7.9.0 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.

XpathBrowser in 'b' or 'browser' variables
 Current url: data:,
In [1]: b.get('github.com/joaduo/xpathwebdriver/')
INFO 05:53:35:  Current url: https://github.com/joaduo/xpathwebdriver/

Using unittest library

import unittest
from xpathwebdriver.simple_xpath_browser import SimpleXpathBrowser

class SearchEnginesDemo(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        # Get Xpath browser
        self.browser = SimpleXpathBrowser()

    def tearDown(self):
        # Make sure we quit those webdrivers created in this specific "level of life"
        del self.browser

    def test_duckduckgo(self):
        # Load a local page for the demo
        self.browser.get_url('https://duckduckgo.com/')
        # Type smoothtest and press enter
        self.browser.fill(".//*[@id='search_form_input_homepage']", 'xpathwebdriver\n')

Check a more options in the examples directory.

Installing Selenium

To make sure you installed selenium and webdriver correctly use the code below:

from selenium import webdriver
import time
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get('https://www.google.com')
print('You can 10 secs to check the browser window')
time.sleep(10)

Find the easiest way to install selenium in your environment.

Then install driver for chrome and gecko from:

• https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/#thirdPartyDrivers

• http://chromedriver.chromium.org/

• https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases

• PhantomJs: http://phantomjs.org/download.html (has the driver embedded)

Decompressed executables should be in yor PATH. If you update python’s webdriver package make sure you update browsers and drivers.

Running the interactive shell

Install ipython package (in Ubuntu probably you can install ipython or ipython3 package)

pip install ipython

You then can run from command line

xpathshell

Or opening a website:

xpathshell duckduckgo.com

To open https://duckduckgo.com

You will get an IPython interactive shell like:

XpathBrowser in 'b' or 'browser' variables
 Current url: https://duckduckgo.com/
In [1]:

You can check XpathBrowser api at:

• https://github.com/joaduo/xpathwebdriver/blob/master/xpathwebdriver_tests/test_XpathBrowser.py

• https://github.com/joaduo/xpathwebdriver/blob/master/xpathwebdriver/xpath_browser.py

Useful links for working with XPath

• https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/firebug/

• https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/firepath/

• http://ricostacruz.com/cheatsheets/xpath.html

• http://xpath.alephzarro.com/content/cheatsheet.html

Killing processes hanging around

Depeding on your configuration from virtualdisplay and browser, processes like:

Xvnc
Xvfb
Xephyr
chromedriver
...

may keep hanging arround. You may want to kill them

# check the wanted process is alive
ps faux | grep Xvnc
# and you can kill it. If you are running as root, make sure you are not killing someone else's process too
pkill Xvnc