Sending unicode with Selenium Webdriver on python

Question

I'm using Selenium Webdriver with python for running tests on a website.

python 2.7.2 with latest Selenium

I can't figure out how to send unicode such as German "Umlaute" (öäüß) to an input form. As far as I know webdriver can handle unicode so this might be a python problem.

# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.google.de")
i = u"hälp me"
driver.find_element_by_css_selector("INPUT[name=\"q\"]").send_keys(i)

This works without errors but does not send the "ä". Is there any further encoding/decoding required...?

Cheers

Presumably the HTML page has an encoding; encode the input to that encoding before calling .send_keys() might work? google.de sez it's encoded to ISO-8859-1, so try .send_keys(i.encode('latin1'). — Martijn Pieters
– Martijn Pieters, Commented Jan 10, 2013 at 10:17
it sends nothing instead of the ä. If google.de runs on ISO-8859-1 I should be good with i="hälp me" since my file is encoded # -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*- but that throws an error UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x8a in position 0: invalid start byte. i.encode("latin1") doesn't work either - same error — ananda
– ananda, Commented Jan 10, 2013 at 10:37
I've also tried yahoo.de with is utf-8 encoded with the original code... no success. Also I've tried the Chrome webdriver but it gives the same error. Moreover, I've tried i.decode("iso-8859-1").encode("utf-8") with and without the u in the variable declaration. No success, I'm running out of ideas =( — ananda
– ananda, Commented Jan 10, 2013 at 12:55

ananda · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-10 15:48:03Z

5

After some hours of trying I finally got it =) Looks like my IDE (Komodo) caused the problem - after setting the encoding in preferences to latin-4 it works nicely in two different ways:

Declare string as unicode:

# -*- coding: iso-8859-4 -*-

from selenium import webdriver
from sys import version_info

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

driver.get("http://www.google.de")

i = u"hälp me"
driver.find_element_by_css_selector("INPUT[name=\"q\"]").send_keys(i)

Decode latin-4 and convert to unicode:

# -*- coding: iso-8859-4 -*-

from selenium import webdriver
from sys import version_info

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

driver.get("http://www.google.de")

i = "hälp me"
i = unicode(i.decode("iso-8859-4"))
driver.find_element_by_css_selector("INPUT[name=\"q\"]").send_keys(i)

Thanks to everybody who helped me!

Cheers

answered Jan 10, 2013 at 15:48

ananda

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1 Comment

jfs Over a year ago

(1) don't use non-ascii characters inside bytestrings (it is explicitly forbidden in Python 3). Either use u'' unicode literals or add from __future__ import unicode_literals at the top, to create Unicode string. (2) unrelated: use single quotes, to avoid escaping double quotes in Python source: '[name="q"]'. (3) use utf-8 encoding for your Python source (configure your IDE/editors accordingly) unless you have a very good reason not to.

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