If you have installed Selenium Python bindings, you can start using it from Python like this.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.python.org")
assert "Python" in driver.title
elem = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
elem.clear()
elem.send_keys("pycon")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
assert "No results found." not in driver.page_source
driver.close()

The above script can be saved into a file (eg:- python_org_search.py), then it can be run like this:

python python_org_search.py

The python which you are running should have the selenium module installed.

2.2. Above Code Explaination

The selenium.webdriver module provides all the WebDriver implementations. Currently supported WebDriver implementations are Firefox, Chrome, IE and Remote. The Keys class provide keys in the keyboard like RETURN, F1, ALT etc.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

Next, the instance of Firefox WebDriver is created.

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

The driver.get method will navigate to a page given by the URL. WebDriver will wait until the page has fully loaded (that is, the “onload” event has fired) before returning control to your test or script. Be aware that if your page uses a lot of AJAX on load then WebDriver may not know when it has completely loaded:

driver.get("http://www.python.org")

The next line is an assertion to confirm that title has “Python” word in it:

assert "Python" in driver.title

WebDriver offers a number of ways to find elements using one of the find_element_by_* methods. For example, the input text element can be located by its name attribute using find_element_by_name method. A detailed explanation of finding elements is available in the Locating Elements chapter:

elem = driver.find_element_by_name("q")

Next, we are sending keys, this is similar to entering keys using your keyboard. Special keys can be sent using Keys class imported from selenium.webdriver.common.keys. To be safe, we’ll first clear any pre-populated text in the input field (e.g. “Search”) so it doesn’t affect our search results:

elem.clear()
elem.send_keys("pycon")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

After submission of the page, you should get the result if there is any. To ensure that some results are found, make an assertion:

assert "No results found." not in driver.page_source

Finally, the browser window is closed. You can also call quit method instead of close. The quit will exit entire browser whereas close will close one tab, but if just one tab was open, by default most browser will exit entirely.:

driver.close()