The end goal is to send myself an email if my public ip address changes, as I don’t have dynamic dns and have to manually enter the ip addresses myself for my web server. I’ve done all I possibly can to try and get bash utilities to do the job for me, but CenturyLink is unfortunately out to block me no matter how I configure my outbound mail.
So I’ve turned to graphical python/selenium web page automation, which will sign into my gmail account for me, click the ‘compose’ button, then enter in the To:, Subject:, and text segments and hit send. Everything is working except for one small part – the To: field. The html/css is different for this than all the others and no matter how I try to select the field using
driver.find_element_by_class_name()
or
driver.find_element_by_id()
I just can’t seem to fill out the field. Bash will give me an error like
:lo cannot be reached by keyboard
or textarea#:lo.vO is not a valid selector
When I did an inspect element, the element looked like this:
<textarea rows="1" id=":lo" class="vO" name="to" spellcheck="false" autocomplete="false" autocapitalize="off" autocorrect="off" tabindex="1" dir="ltr" aria-label="To" role="combobox" aria-autocomplete="list" style="width: 462px;"></textarea>
My code so far is this: (note: which does not include getting ip info yet, just gmail login / manipulation)
from selenium import webdriver import time driver = webdriver.Firefox(); driver.get('https://www.gmail.com'); username = driver.find_element_by_id('identifierId'); username.send_keys("EMAIL"); driver.find_elements_by_class_name('RveJvd.snByac')[1].click(); time.sleep(2); #password not entered in username field password = driver.find_element_by_class_name('whsOnd.zHQkBf'); password.send_keys("PASSWORD"); driver.find_elements_by_class_name('RveJvd.snByac')[0].click(); #end login, start composing time.sleep(5); #wait for sign in driver.find_element_by_class_name('T-I.J-J5-Ji.T-I-KE.L3').click(); to = driver.find_element_by_class_name('textarea#:lo.vO'); #incorrect to.send_keys("EMAIL"); subject = driver.find_element_by_id(':l6'); subject.send_keys("IP Address changed"); content = driver.find_element_by_id(':m9'); content.send_keys("Test Testn");
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Answer
I think there seems to be a dynamic variation with the element ids in different browser. For me when I tried to compose the mail to fetch the XPATH I noted the XPATH was //*[@id=":oa"]
but while the script launched it was //*[@id=":my"]
.
To accommodate this I have used element querying using XPATH //textarea[1]
as the Recipients section is always the first textarea
. This proves to work well consistently across different browser sessions.
Code Snippet
>>> d = webdriver.Chrome() [14424:7728:0809/135301.805:ERROR:install_util.cc(597)] Unable to read registry value HKLMSOFTWAREPoliciesGoogleChromeMachineLevelUserCloudPolicyEnrollmentToken for writing result=2 DevTools listening on ws://127.0.0.1:12582/devtools/browser/31a5ab42-a4d2-46f3-95c6-a0c9ddc129d7 >>> d.get('https://www.gmail.com') >>> d.find_element_by_xpath(xpath) <selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement (session="6072286733856e53b69af89ea981001c", element="0.42218760484088036-1")> >>> d.find_element_by_xpath('//textarea[1]').send_keys('cswadhikar@gmail.com')
Result