Website Automation for Complete Noobs Part 2

In the first article in the series, we installed Python & Selenium and used them to write a script that opens a browser. In today’s article, we’ll look at how to do some basic inspection of web pages and modify our script to interact with them.

Selenium can do most of the same things you can do with web pages-namely, clicking & typing. But, just like you read and interpret what you see to know what to do, you need to tell your script how to find and do the things you want it to.

The easiest way to do this is to use the “inspect” functionality that exists in most modern browsers to help find identifiers you can use in your code. Let’s try it out with everybody’s ol’ buddy Google. Browse to google.com, right-click the search box, and pick Inspect.

This will take you to the selected element in the web page’s code. This is the part where you start to get some choices. Selenium has a lot of different ways to find elements, so you need to know about what you can use and compare it to what’s available. Usually the most reliable way to get an element is by using its id.