Getting Started with Selenium and Python
Introduction
Web Browser Automation is gaining popularity, and many frameworks/tools have arose to offer automation services to developers.
Web Browser Automation is often used for testing purposes in development and production environments, though it’s also often used for web scraping data from public sources, analysis, and data processing.
Really, what you do with automation is up to you, though, just make sure that what you’re doing is legal, as “bots” created with automation tools can often infringe laws or a site’s terms of service.
Selenium is one of the widely used tools used for Web Browser Automation, and offers a lot of functionality and power over a browser.
It supports many languages such as C#, Java, Perl, PHP, and Ruby, though for the sake of this tutorial, we’ll be using it with Python on Windows.
What is Selenium?
Selenium is a great tool that allows developers to simulate end-users with only a few lines of code. Using the tools it offers, it’s very easy to use web pages and simulate a human, though it’s hard to really replicate human behavior.
To combat “bots”, which are meant to replicate humans, many sophisticated systems are used