Web browser automation with Selenium

Selenium WebDriver can be used to automate pages in web browser. It has more features than elm (see Web automation). For example can wait for web page loaded, extract text, execute JavaScript. But not so easy to use. Weaker than Playwright.

Install NuGet packages Selenium.Support and Selenium.WebDriver.ChromeDriver. Update them for each new Chrome version.

This script starts new Chrome instance and then calls various automation functions.

/*/ nuget selenium\Selenium.Support; nuget selenium\Selenium.WebDriver.ChromeDriver; /*/
using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Interactions;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.Extensions;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI;

//Set Chrome options.
ChromeOptions options = new();
//Enable and maybe edit this if want to use an existing profile. To get profile path, in Chrome open URL "chrome://version/".
//	Then before starting this script also may need to close existing Chrome instances that use this profile.
//options.AddArguments($"user-data-dir={folders.LocalAppData + @"Google\Chrome\User Data"}", "profile-directory=Profile 1");

//Start new Chrome instance.
var service = ChromeDriverService.CreateDefaultService(pathname.getDirectory(typeof(ChromeDriver).Assembly.Location));
service.HideCommandPromptWindow = true;
using var driver = new ChromeDriver(service, options);
driver.Manage().Window.Maximize();

//Open web page.
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://www.libreautomate.com/forum/");

//Get page title, URL, HTML source. Extract all text.
print.it(driver.Title);
print.it(driver.Url);
//print.it(driver.PageSource);
var body = driver.FindElement(By.TagName("body"));
print.it(body.Text);

//Find and click a link. It opens new page and waits util it is loaded.
var e = driver.FindElement(By.LinkText("Shared C# code"));
e.Click();

//Find a text input field and enter text. To find it use XPath copied from Chrome Developer Tools.
var e2 = driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//*[@id='search']/input[1]"));
e2.SendKeys("find");

//How to invoke mouse or keyboard actions.
Actions action = new Actions(driver);
action.ContextClick(e2).Perform();

//Wait. Then the script will close the web browser.
2.s();
dialog.show("Close web browser", x: ^1);

Also it's possible to connect to an existing Chrome instance, but with Selenium it rarely works well. Use Playwright instead.

More info on the internet.