ken

auto switch browser tabs
 by ken

How to auto switch browser tabs

Imagine you have a big monitor and you would like to display something from multiple web links, would it be nice if there is a way to auto switch between the multiple browser tabs in a fixed period? In this article, I will be sharing with you how to auto switch browser tabs via selenium, an automated testing tool.

There is a very detailed documentation on the python selenium library, you may want to check this document as the starting point. For this article, I will just walk through the complete code for this automation, so that you can use it as a reference in case you are tying to implement something similar.

Let’s get started!

To auto launch the browser, we need to first download the web driver for the browser. For instance, if you are using chrome browser, you may download the driver file here. Do check your browser version to make sure you download the driver for the correct version.

As the prerequisite, you will also need to run the below command to install the selenium package in your working environment.

pip install selenium

Launch the browser

Then import all the necessary modules into your script. For this article, we will need to use the below modules:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.common.exceptions import SessionNotCreatedException

import time
import os, sys

Let’s assume we want to display the below 3 links in your browser and make them auto switching between each other:

url_1 = "https://www.google.com/maps/@1.3085909,103.8403575,14z"
url_2 = "https://weather.com/en-SG/weather/today"
url_3 = "https://edition.cnn.com/"

Assuming you’ve already downloaded the chrome driver file and put it into the current script folder. Then let’s start to initiate the web driver to launch the browser:

options = Options()
options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)

try:	
	driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=os.getcwd() + "\\chromedriver.exe", options=options)
except SessionNotCreatedException as e:
	print(e)
	print("please upgrade the chromedriver.exe from https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads")
	sys.exit(1)

You may wonder why we need a options parameter here?  It’s actually optional, but you may see the “Loading of unpacked extensions is disabled by the administrator” warning without setting useAutomationExtension to False. There are plenty of other options to control the browser behavior, check here for the documentation.

As frequently you will see there is a new version of chrome, and it may not work with old driver file anymore. So, it’s better we catch this exception and show some error message to guide users to upgrade the driver.

You can set the chrome window position by doing the below, but it does not matter if you wish to maximize the window later.

driver.set_window_position(2000, 1)

Let’s open the first link and maximize our window (This also can be done by options.addArguments("start-maximized")). And we want to execute some JavaScript to zoom out a bit so that we can see clearly.

#open window 1
driver.get(url_1)
driver.maximize_window()
driver.execute_script("document.body.style.zoom='120%'")
time.sleep(1)

To open the second tab, we need to use JavaScript to open a blank tab, and switch the active tab to the second tab. The driver.window_handles keeps a list of handlers for the opened windows, so window_handles[1] refers to the second tab.

driver.execute_script("window.open('');")
driver.switch_to.window(driver.window_handles[1])

Next, we will open the second link. And for this tab, let’s scroll down 300px to skip the ads second at the page header.

#open second link
driver.get(url_2)
driver.execute_script("document.body.style.zoom='90%'")
driver.execute_script("window.scrollBy(0,300);")
time.sleep(1)

Similarly, we can open the third tab with the below code:

#open window 3
driver.execute_script("window.open('');")
driver.switch_to.window(driver.window_handles[2])
driver.get(url_3)		
driver.execute_script("document.body.style.zoom='90%'")
driver.execute_script("window.scrollBy(0,200);")
time.sleep(1)

Auto switch between tabs

Once everything is ready, we shall write the logic to auto switch between the different tabs at certain interval. To do that, we need to know how to perform the below 3 things:

  • Identify what is the active link showing now

We can use driver.title attribute to check if the page title contains certain keyword for the particular website, so that we know which page is active now

  • Switch to a new tab

We can continue to use driver.switch_to.window to switch the tab, but we need to have logic to determine which is the next tab we want to switch to

  • Refresh the page (in case there is any updates)

We can use driver.refresh() to refresh the page, but we will lose the setting such as zooming in/out, so we need to set it again

So let’s take a look at the complete code:

nextIndex = 2

start = time.time()

while True:
	
	#stop running after 5 minutes
	if (time.time() - start >= 5*60):
		break
		
	if "Google Maps" in driver.title:
		driver.refresh()
		driver.execute_script("document.body.style.zoom='120%'")
		time.sleep(3)
		nextIndex = 0 if nextIndex + 1 > 2 else nextIndex + 1
		
	elif "CNN" in driver.title:
		driver.refresh()
		driver.execute_script("document.body.style.zoom='90%'")
		time.sleep(5)
		nextIndex = 0 if nextIndex + 1 > 2 else nextIndex + 1
		
	elif "Weather" in driver.title:
		driver.refresh()
		driver.execute_script("document.body.style.zoom='90%'")
		time.sleep(2)
		nextIndex = 0 if nextIndex + 1 > 2 else nextIndex + 1
		
	driver.switch_to.window(driver.window_handles[nextIndex])

So each of the tab will be active for a few seconds before switching to the next tab. And after 5 minutes, this loop will be stopped.

If we wish to close all tabs at the end of the script, we can perform the below:

for window in driver.window_handles:
	driver.switch_to.window(window)
	driver.close()

So that’s it and congratulations that you have completed a new automation project to auto switch browser tabs for Chrome. As per always, welcome any comments or questions.

in Automation / Python / Resources 0 comments
Python tuple
 by ken

Python built-in types – Tuples

Tuple is a python built-in data structure which holds a sequence of values, and the values can be in any data type. If you write a hundred lines of python code, it is almost impossible to avoid it in your code, as it comes in implicitly or explicitly from your variable assignment and iteration to return values of your method. In this article, I will be sharing with you where and how the tuples will be possibly used in your code.

Variable assignment with Tuple

You may have written the code in the below way to assign the values to variables in one line. The left side is the tuple of variables, and the right side is the tuple of values/expressions.

sort_by_name, sort_by_date = True, False
#output : sort_by_name True, sort_by_date False
key, val = "20200601" , "Mon"
#output : key '20200601', val 'Mon'

Sometimes if you want to swap the values of two variables, you do not need to create a temp variable for swapping. The below will do a perfect job to swap the value for key, val variables.

key, val = val, key
#output: key 'Mon', val '20200601'

Traverse the elements of a sequence

If you want to iterate through each of the elements in a sequence and meanwhile get the index of the element, you can do it by below code:

for idx, label in enumerate('ABCDEFG'):
    print(idx, label)

#output: 0, A
#1, B
#...

When iterating a dictionary, the iterms method returns a list of tuples, and each tuple is the key and value pair, e.g.:

company_info = {"name" : "Alibaba", "headquarter" : "Hangzhou, China", "founded" : "4 April 1999"}
for key, val in company_info.items():
    print(f"{key} : {val}")

If you have checked my another post – How to swap the key and value in a python dictionary, it is just an extension to the above.

Iterate multiple sequences at one time with zip

If you use the built-in zip function to iterate multiple sequences at one time, it actually returns an iterator of tuples. See the below example:

names = ["Alibaba", "Amazon", "Google"]
countries = ["China", "USA", "USA"]
years = ["1999", "1996", "1998"]
for rec in zip(names, countries, years):
    print(rec)

#output:
#('Alibaba', 'China', '1999')
#('Amazon', 'USA', '1996')
#('Google', 'USA', '1998')

Return multiple values from function

Normally a function can only returns 1 value, but with tuple, you can return multiple values even in different data types. (technically speaking, it is still 1 value but tuple type)

e.g. The python built-in method divmod:

quotient, remainder = divmod(10, 3)
print(quotient, remainder)
#output: 3 1

You can also define your own function to return multiple values like below:

def split_email(email):
    user_name, company_site = email.split("@")
    return user_name, company_site


split_email("contact@codeforests.com")
#output: ('contact', 'codeforests.com')

With this example, I am going to wrap up my article for this topic. If you have any questions or comments, please share in the below.

 

in Tutorials / Python 0 comments
python regular expression match, search and findall
 by ken

Python regular expression match, search and findall

Python beginners may sometimes get confused by this match and search functions in the regular expression module, since they are accepting the same parameters and return the same result in most of the simple use cases.  In this article, let’s discuss about the difference between these two functions.

match vs search in Python regular expression

Let’s start from an example. Let’s say if we want to get the words which ending with “ese” in the languages, both of the below match and search return the same result in match objects.

import re
languages = "Japanese,English"
m = re.match("\w+(?=ese)",languages)
#m returns : <re.Match object; span=(0, 5), match='Japan'>

m = re.search("\w+(?=ese)",languages)
#m returns : <re.Match object; span=(0, 5), match='Japan'>

But if the sequence of your languages changed, e.g. languages = “English, Japanese”, then you will see some different results:

languages = "English,Japanese" 
m = re.match("\w+(?=ese)",languages) 
#m returns empty
m = re.search("\w+(?=ese)",languages) 
#m returns : <re.Match object; span=(8, 13), match='Japan'>

The reason is that match function only starts the matching from the beginning of your string, while search function will start matching from anywhere in your string. Hence if the pattern you want to match may not start from the beginning, you shall always use search function.

In this case, if you want to restrict the matching only start from the beginning, you can also achieve it with search function by specifying “^” in your pattern:

languages = "English,Japanese,Chinese" 
m = re.search("^\w+(?=ese)",languages) 
#m returns empty
m = re.search("\w+(?=ese)",languages)
#m returns: <re.Match object; span=(8, 13), match='Japan'>

findall in Python regular expression

You may also notice when there are multiple occurrences of the pattern, search function only returns the first matched. This sometimes may not be desired when you actually want to see the full list of matched patterns. To return all the occurrences, you can use the findall function:

languages = "English,Japanese,Chinese,Burmese"
m = re.findall("\w+(?=ese)", languages)
#m returns: ['Japan', 'Chin', 'Burm']

 

 

in Tutorials 0 comments
python send email with attachment via smtplib
 by ken

How to send email with attachment via python smtplib

In one of my previous article, I have discussed about how to send email from outlook application. That has assumed you have already installed outlook and configured your email account on the machine where you want to run your script. In this article, I will be sharing with you how to automatically send email with attachments via lower level API, to be more specific, by using python smtplib where you do not need to set up anything in your environment to make it work.

For this article, I will demonstrate to you to send a HTML format email from a gmail account with some attachment. So besides the smtplib module, we will need to use another two modules – ssl and email.

Let’s get started!

First, you will need to find out the SMTP server and port info to send email via google account. You can find this information from this link. For your easy reading, I have captured in the below screenshot.

codeforests - google smtp server configuration info

So we are going to use the server: smtp.gmail.com and port 587 for our case. (you may search online to find out more info about the SSL & TLS, we will not discuss much about it in this article)

Let’s start to import all the modules we need:

import smtplib, ssl
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart 
from email.mime.text import MIMEText 
from email.mime.application import MIMEApplication

As we are going to send the email in HTML format (which are you able to unlock a lot features such as adding in styles, drawing tables etc.), we will need to use the MIMEText. And also the MIMEMultipart and MIMEApplication for the attachment.

Build up the email message

To build up our email message, we need to create mixed type MIMEMultipart object so that we can send both text and attachment. And next, we shall specify the from, to, cc and subject attributes.

smtp_server = 'smtp.gmail.com'
smtp_port = 587 
#Replace with your own gmail account
gmail = 'yourmail@gmail.com'
password = 'your password'

message = MIMEMultipart('mixed')
message['From'] = 'Contact <{sender}>'.format(sender = gmail)
message['To'] = 'contact@company.com'
message['CC'] = 'contact@company.com'
message['Subject'] = 'Hello'

You probably do not want anybody can see your hard coded password here, you may consider to put this email account info into a separate configuration file. Check my another post on the read/write configuration files.

For the HTML message content, we will wrap it into the MIMEText, and then attach it to our MIMEMultipart message:

msg_content = '<h4>Hi There,<br> This is a testing message.</h4>\n'
body = MIMEText(msg_content, 'html')
message.attach(body)

Let’s assume you want to attach a pdf file from your c drive, you can read it in binary mode and pass it into MIMEApplication with MIME type as pdf. Take note on the additional header where you need to specify the name your attachment file.

attachmentPath = "c:\\sample.pdf"
try:
	with open(attachmentPath, "rb") as attachment:
		p = MIMEApplication(attachment.read(),_subtype="pdf")	
		p.add_header('Content-Disposition', "attachment; filename= %s" % attachmentPath.split("\\")[-1]) 
		message.attach(p)
except Exception as e:
	print(str(e))

If you have a list of the attachments, you can loop through the list and attach them one by one with the above code.

Once everything is set properly, we can convert the message object into to a string:

msg_full = message.as_string()

Send email

Here comes to the most important part, we will need to initiate the TLS context and use it to communicate with SMTP server.

context = ssl.create_default_context()

And we will initialize the connection with SMTP server and set the TLS context, then start the handshaking process.

Next it authenticate our gmail account, and in the send mail method, you can specify the sender, to and cc (as a list), as well as the message string. (cc is optional)

with smtplib.SMTP(smtp_server, smtp_port) as server:
	server.ehlo()  
	server.starttls(context=context)
	server.ehlo()
	server.login(gmail, password)
	server.sendmail(gmail, 
				to.split(";") + (cc.split(";") if cc else []),
				msg_full)
	server.quit()

print("email sent out successfully")

Once sendmail completed, you will disconnect with the server by server.quit().

With all above, you shall be able to receive the email triggered from your code. You may want to wrap these codes into a class, so that you can reuse it as service library in your multiple projects.

 

As per always, please share if you have any questions or comments.

in Automation / Resources 6 comments
python cache
 by ken

How to print colored message on command line terminal window

When you are developing a python script with some output messages printed on the terminal window, you may find a little bit boring that all the messages are printed in black and white, especially if some messages are meant for warning, and some just for information only. You may wonder how to print colored message to make them look differently, so that your users are able to pay special attention to those warning or error messages.

In this article, I will be sharing with you a library which allows you to print colored message in your terminal.

Let’s get started!

The library I am going to introduce called colorama, which is a small and clean library for styling your messages in both Windows, Linux and Mac os.

Prerequisite :

You will need to install this library, so that you will be able to run the following code in this article.

pip install colorama

To start using this library, you will need to import the modules, and call the init() method at the beginning of your script or your class initialization method.

import colorama
from colorama import Fore, Back, Style
colorama.init()

Print colored message with colorama

The init method also accepts some **kwargs to overwrite it’s default behaviors. E.g. by default, the style will not be reset back after printing out a message,  and the subsequent messages will be following the same styles. You can pass in autoreset = true to the init method, so that the style will be reset after each printing statement.

Below are the options you can use when formatting the font, background and style.

Fore: BLACK, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, MAGENTA, CYAN, WHITE, RESET.
Back: BLACK, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, MAGENTA, CYAN, WHITE, RESET.
Style: DIM, NORMAL, BRIGHT, RESET_ALL

To use it in your message, you can do as per below to wrap your messages with the styles:

print(Fore.CYAN + "Cyan messages will be printed out just for info only" + Style.RESET_ALL)
print(Fore.RED + "Red messages are meant to be to warning or error" + Style.RESET_ALL)
print(Fore.YELLOW + Back.GREEN +  "Yellow messages are debugging info" + Style.RESET_ALL)

This is how it would look like in your terminal:

Python printed colored message with colorama

As I mentioned earlier, if you don’t set the autoreset to true, you will need to reset the style at the end of your each message, so that different message applies different styles.

What if you want to apply the styles when asking user’s input ? Let’s see an example:

print(Fore.YELLOW)
choice = input("Enter YES to confrim:")
print(Style.RESET_ALL)
if str.upper(choice) in ["YES",'Y']:
    print(Fore.GREEN + "You have just confirmed to proceed." + Style.RESET_ALL)
else:
    print(Fore.RED + "You did not enter yes, let's stop here" + Style.RESET_ALL)

By wrapping the input inside Fore.YELLOW and Style.RESET_ALL, whatever output messages from your script or user entry, the same style will be applied.

Let’s put all the above into a script and run it in the terminal to check how it looks like.

Python printed colored message with colorama

Yes, that’s exactly what we want to achieve! Now you can wrap your printing statement into a method e.g.: print_colored_message, so that you do not need to repeat the code everywhere.

As per always, please share if you have any comments or questions.

 

in Resources 0 comments