An appropriate alternate title would be: How to control a web page or test your website with Python. Recently, I was given the following assignment:

1) Login to a website
2) click on a toolbar and load a specific search form
3) enter some data into one of the fields on the form and search
4) if found, click another button
5) repeat

Of course, I was supposed to do all this with Python, my favorite programming language. My first thought was to use the Mechanize package, but while I could login to the website using that, I was unable to get it to load the form. Why? Well, unfortunately the aforementioned toolbar was made using javascript and it seemed to be generating the form too. For whatever reason, the Python port doesn’t support loading javascript elements, although I did find out that the project it’s based on has a javascript plugin, so there is hope that it might eventually. Thus, I went looking for another solution and recalled that Selenium might fit the bill. In the end, it worked quite well. Since I won’t be able to show you what I did exactly because it was for an internal project, we’ll be automating Gmail instead. Let’s get cracking! (more…)