Make a script that clicks a button on a webpage using python

Introduction

This article will teach you to make a script that clicks a button on a webpage using python. You will learn in this article a python library called selenium which is open source automation library used to scrape websites data and automate actions in a website.

How to make a script that click button on webpage using python.

We will use selenium for this, but let’s know what selenium is: Selenium is an open-source umbrella project that encompasses a variety of browser automation tools and frameworks. It gives you a replay tool for creating functional tests without learning a test scripting language. It includes extensions to simulate user interaction with browsers and a distribution server for scaling browser allocation and infrastructure for W3C WebDriver implementations, which allow you to develop interchangeable code for all major web browsers. Volunteer contributors have put in thousands of hours of their own time to make this project feasible and have made the source code freely available for everyone to use, enjoy, and enhance. Selenium brings together browser vendors, engineers, and enthusiasts to promote an open conversation around web platform automation. The initiative holds an annual conference to educate and nourish the community. WebDriver, the core of Selenium, is an interface for writing instruction sets that can be run in various browsers. The Selenium Python bindings provide a simple API for writing Selenium WebDriver functional/acceptance tests. You can use the Selenium Python API to access all of Selenium WebDriver's features simply and naturally. Selenium Python bindings provide a simple API for interacting with Selenium WebDrivers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Remote. Python versions 3.5 and higher are currently supported. Unfortunately, Selenium got some disadvantages, like:

1. It's only for web based applications
2. Webdriver which is essential to be able to use it is hard to install and requires web browser existance.
3. It's very slow in testing that a dynamic site testing takes about 1-10 minutes per webpage (according to the site complexity)

   How to install selenium

   Install the selenium package with pip. The standard library in Python 3 includes pip. You may install selenium using pip as follows:

pip install selenium

To construct isolated Python environments, you might use virtualenv. Virtualenv is almost identical to venv in Python 3. Python bindings for Selenium are also available on the PyPI website for the selenium package. And manually install webdriver of a browser installed in your computer with the same version for the following links: Chrome: https://sites.google.com/chromium.org/driver/ Edge: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/webdriver/ Firefox: https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases Safari: https://webkit.org/blog/6900/webdriver-support-in-safari-10/ Solution 1

from selenium import webdriver.
import webbrowser. 
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver. get("example.com")
button = driver.find_element_by_id('idofbutton')
button. click()

In general

We should use selenium to click button on webpage using python.

Conclusion

The most straightforward method to button on a webpage using python is by selenium. As it load Javascript data in the webpage and behave like a user. But, Selenium is slow and takes a lot of time in automation projects like scrapping data.