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Comment by noinsight | Hacker News Reader

Selenium can be used for browser automation.

Yup, Selenium has been around since 2004, and is now the basis of the W3C standard [1] for browser automation. Most browser vendors now officially support the spec. (Disclosure: I started the Selenium project. AMA.)

[1]: https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html

I ran into a problem with the automation project I was working on when I tried using Selenium. I was trying to print (shipping labels from Amazon) and Selenium (at least Chrome webdriver) can't see the print dialog :( Any ideas?

I've used Selenium a bunch the last couple months to automate daily/hourly jobs to pull data from 3rd party UIs that don't offer an API. I couldn't imagine not having a tool like Selenium at my disposal!

Pro tip: create a chrome extension with permissions on all http:// and https:// sites, or run it through Node-Webkit/nw.io, then you can use the generic DOMParser and querySelectorAll with a pretty fluent interface on any site you can imagine.

example here: https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/DuckieTV/blob/angular/js/uti...

> or run it through Node-Webkit/nw.io

That's quite interesting! I thought node-webkit isn't suitable (yet) for such purpose. Could you go into more detail on how to do parsing/automation external sites with it?

It's very suitable! (I'm using it in DuckieTV in production, works like a charm!)

Basically, you can use xmlhttp to fetch any webpage becaused of relaxed restrictions. then use DOMParser (a built-in browser component, that you can even shim) to create a virtual DOM of that xmlhttp result, and execute regular querySelector and querySelectorAlll queries on that :)

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