Selenium WebDriver with Perl

Question

I am trying to run the Selenium driver with Perl bindings, and due to the lack of examples and documentation, I am running into some roadblocks. I have figured out how to do some basic things, but I seem to be running into some issues with other simple things like validating the text on a page using Remote::Driver package.

If I try to do something like this:

$sel->get("https://www.yahoo.com/" );
$ret = $sel->find_element("//div[contains( text(),'Thursday, April 26, 2012')]");

I get a message back that the element couldn't be found. I am using xpath because the driver package doesn't appear to have a sub specific for finding text.. at least not that I've found.

If my xpath setup is wrong or if someone knows a better way, that would be extremely helpful. I'm having problems with some button clicking too.. but this seems like it should be easier and is bugging me.

That question can become useful if you describe a concrete problem that you need help with. Show the code you have so far, and an example Web page that you want to test against. (See How to ask and the site FAQ.) — daxim
– daxim, Commented Apr 26, 2012 at 16:28
My general advice is to install the selenium-ide for firefox and set it to generate perl code for you. Then you can just click around and it will record what you are doing by generating the appropriate code (in several possible languages). At the very least if will give you solid examples of what to do. — frankc
– frankc, Commented Apr 26, 2012 at 17:04
I actually did that, but the generator I found only works for the WWW::Selenium package, not the newer Remote::Driver library that is used for Selenium Webdriver.. it breaks things down nicely, but the functions are all completely different. Is there another one? Also, I managed to get it working with xpath for now. I don't know what it wasn't as I swapped the data back for my site and things just started working. It doesn't seem to handle finding partial text, but that is ok I suppose. If someone does know of a webdriver formatter for the IDE I would very much appreciate a link! — dubus
– dubus, Commented Apr 26, 2012 at 17:06

Freddy Vega · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-09 21:08:28Z

1

Finding text on a web page and comparing that text to some "known good value" using Selenium::Remote::Driver can be implemented as follows:

File: SomeWebApp.pm

package SomeWebApp;

sub get_text_present {

    my $self = shift;
    my $target = shift;
    my $locator = shift;

    my $text = $self->{driver}->find_element($target, $locator)->get_text();

    return $text;

}

Somewhere in your test script: test.pl

my $text = $some_web_app->get_text_present("MainContent_RequiredFieldValidator6", "id");

The above finds the element identified by $target using the locating scheme identified by $locator and stores it in the variable $text. You can then use that to compare / validate as required / needed.

answered May 9, 2012 at 21:08

Freddy Vega

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Phil Perry · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-31 19:16:20Z

https is a tad slower loading than http. Although WebDriver is pretty good about waiting until it's figured out that the requested page is fully loaded, maybe you need to give it a little help here. Add a sleep(2); after the get() call and see if it works. If it does, try cutting down to 1 second. You can also do a get_title call to see if you've loaded the page you think you have.

The other possibility is that your text target isn't quite exactly the same as what's on the page. You could try looking first for one word, such as "April", and see if you get a hit, and then expand until you find the mismatch (e.g., does this string actually have a newline or break within it? How about an HTML entity such as a non-breaking space?). Also, you are looking for that bit of text anywhere under a div (all child text supposedly is concatenated, and then the search done). That would more likely cast too wide a net than not get anything at all, but it's worth knowing.

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