How to get HTML data in Selenium?

Is Selenium a parser?

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No. Toctree:: :maxdepth: 2. apiref. testcases. performancetest. Selenium Test Builder. The Selenium API provides a basic WebDriver implementation. Selenium Test Builder allows extension of Selenium with a full-featured testing framework. The Selenium Test Builder is not just an arbitrary collection of web. Page-testing tools. It is meant to be a unified framework that can automate WebDriver testing in several different programming languages. When writing Selenium scripts, you interact directly with the `webdriver` package. And the `browsercommands` module; it then uses a combination of these. Tools to build a complete test suite. The Selenium Test Builder API can be used from Python, Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby. And PHP. The Selenium libraries are used as the "test" package for each of these languages. This makes it possible to write tests in these languages using the same APIs used by Selenium. Figure::/images/seleniumtestbuilderlogo.png
:align: center. Buildseleniumtest: ------------------------. The Selenium Test Builder uses an architecture that is similar to Zope's testing. Architecture (see ). When you invoke ``selenium-test-builder`` with the ``-b`` flag, it will spawn a new build environment to run the tests in. Each language supported has a test suite that comes as part of the library it. Is based on. These test suites use the test suites provided by the core of the language package. In the same way Zope is installed with Zope Management Console, Selenium Test. Builder is installed with the Selenium Driver. To do this, you need to start the Selenium Server from within a command-line shell. Warning:: When your test cases include browser navigation, you need to ensure you. have the latest version of Selenium WebDriver installed on the computer. See :ref:`seleniuminstallationnotes` for more information.

Can you parse HTML in Selenium?

Yes.

Can you use JavaScript libraries? Yes. In fact, I think every page of most modern web apps can be parsed with Selenium. You just have to learn and understand how it works.

But can you build web apps using Selenium alone? It depends on what you mean by "web apps". Can you write the code that a real browser would? No, Selenium and other client-side JavaScript testing tools are just "tools", they won't let you build any HTML. It's more a question of whether you want to build "real" software or only use a tool for testing existing HTML.

Can you write an entire web application? Well, if you mean run JavaScript remotely (as in through a Java or .NET app) then you need a virtual machine. But, like every test tool, Selenium isn't designed to create and run end-to-end tests and certainly not full web apps. If all you want to do is use it to check the behaviour of a specific piece of client-side logic then yes, you can!

I'll illustrate some of these concepts with a couple of demos below. Let's start with plain HTML and JavaScript, as that's the easiest to demonstrate. What is a 'page'? Well, a web browser is just a very complicated HTTP server! If you can't create a server that returns static files when requested via a URL like , then it's not really a 'server', it's just a very, very slow download mechanism. A real web server will work similarly to how mydomain.com works.

A Web page is a file containing HTML and optionally a mix of JavaScript and CSS together with optional links to other files, images and video content that also can potentially be downloaded as resources. When you visit mydomain.com in your browser, you are opening a file called mydomain.com called index.html - that's all it does. There's nothing else on mydomain.com unless there are also other pages being served by the same server. On a typical server setup each request would open a single file at a time, so when you load index.html you're basically loading a snapshot of the currently-open file on disk, if any.