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Is it possible to control a web browser like Firefox using Python?
I would want to do things like
etc.
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To display web based documents to users by using python, there is a module called webbrowser. It provides high level interface to handle web documents. On UNIX based system, this module supports lynx, Netscape, Mosaic etc browsers. For Windows and Macintosh, it uses the standard browsers.
You have learned that Python can do everything that a web browser can do, and a bit more. You could easily write scripts to control virtual browser instances that run in the cloud. You could create bots that interact with real users or mindlessly fill out forms! Go forth and automate!
There are several benefits of running Python in the browser. It allows you to: Execute the same Python code in the server and the browser. Work with various browser APIs using Python.
Splinter Splinter is a fantastic wrapper-type library that is specially designed for Selenium in Python. Splinter is a free open source tool that can be used to test web applications with Python. You can use this tool for automating the browser operations, such as interacting with other items, visiting URLs, etc.
Selenium Remote Control is a project that comes very close to what you are after. It is really easy to get working in Python with the selenium.webdriver subpackage that comes with it. Once upon a time, these were two projects. They've now been unified.
Simple!
$ pip install -U selenium >>> from selenium import webdriver >>> ff = webdriver.Firefox() >>> ff.get("http://stackoverflow.com/q/3369073/395287") >>> ff.save_screenshot("/absolute/path/to/webpage.png") The documentation can be slightly confusing for Selenium, because there are two modes to interact with browsers. As well as the webdriver mode, there is the ability to talk to a "standalone Selenium Remote Control server". That approach is what is documented first in the official documentation, but I would stick with webdriver for the simple task here.
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