selenium PhantomJS send_keys doesn't work

Question

I am using selenium and PhantomJS for testing. I followed Selenium's simple usage, but send_keys doesn't work on PhantomJS, it works on Firefox. Why? I have to use button.click() instead?

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys

reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()

driver.get("http://www.python.org/")
elem = driver.find_element_by_id("q")
elem.clear()
elem.send_keys("python")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
# button = driver.find_element_by_id('submit')
# button.click()
print driver.title
print driver.page_source
driver.close()

Answer 1

I highly suspect it's just timing issue.

Selenium's click() will wait for page to load if it is redirected after clicking, while send_key() doesn't wait. (PhantomJS is headless, which is faster than Firefox)

Please try add some sleep like time.sleep(5) after elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN), before print driver.title, and see if you can get the result you want.

In real testing project, you just need to use WebDriverWait until driver.title equals to the value you want.