Last week we got Playwright up and running in Python. In this post we build on that and start to automate our browser.
This post is part of my journey to learn Python. You can find the other parts of this series here. You find the code for this post in my PythonFriday repository on GitHub.
Navigate to the web page
Before we can start looking for elements, we need to open the web page we are interested in. We can call the goto() method on the page object (from a Playwright fixture for pytest):
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page.goto("https://github.com") |
If you run Playwright outside of a test class, you can use this code from the codegen template as your starting point:
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from playwright.sync_api import Playwright, sync_playwright, expect def run(playwright: Playwright) -> None: browser = playwright.chromium.launch(headless=False) context = browser.new_context() page = context.new_page() page.goto("https://github.com/") # --------------------- context.close() browser.close() with sync_playwright() as playwright: run(playwright) |
Get the title of a page
We can get the title of the current page with the title() method:
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title = page.title(); |
Locators
Playwright uses locators to find the elements on a web page. There are a few types that we can choose from, but the documentation recommends that we prioritize role locators to locate elements (they are closer to the way users and assistive technology access the page). However, codegen for Python still uses a lot of the other locators and so will we for the time being.
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header = page.get_by_role("heading", name="Let’s build from here") sign_in = page.get_by_role("link", name="Sign in") email_field = page.get_by_placeholder("Email address") |
If we want to search an element by its ID, we can add a # as a prefix or use the id= shorthand in the locator() method:
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lang = page.locator("id=de").text_content() print(lang) lang2 = page.locator("#de").text_content() print(lang2) |
These examples only scratch the surface of locators. The more you work with Playwright, the simpler it gets to use a fitting combination of the various locators. Start with the examples from above and then add more if you need a more precise selector.
Fill input forms
If we get an element that accepts a text input, we can write to it with the fill() method:
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page.get_by_placeholder("Search GitHub").fill("Playwright") |
Click buttons
We can click buttons with the click() method:
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page.get_by_role("link", name="Sign in").click() |
If you selected an element in a form, you can often use press(“Enter”) to simulate the user hitting the enter key on the keyboard:
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page.get_by_placeholder("Search GitHub").press("Enter") |
Read values from elements
The methods inner_text() and text_content() allow us to access the text of an element through the locator:
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text = page.get_by_role("article").inner_text() print(text) text2 = page.get_by_role("article").text_content() print(text2) |
If the element contains other elements with text and we want everything in one go, we can use the method all_inner_texts() to get the content as a list of strings:
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all_texts = page.get_by_role("article").all_inner_texts() for value in all_texts: print(value) |
Close the browser
If you run Playwright outside of pytest, you should close the context and the browser at the end of your application:
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context.close() browser.close() |
Next
With the basics covered, you should be able to automate the Playwright browser for your first tests. Next week we will look at ways to narrow down the reasons why our Playwright automation no longer works.
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