Virtually Navigating Webpages with Python - python

I've been using the 'win32api' module with Python to emulate keyboard and mouse controls in order to make simple bots to do little tasks, like spamming my friends on Skype or cheating in flash games.
Now I wanted a way to do something similar, but rather than emulating keyboard commands to play on a webpage, it would send the data to the webpage directly. For example, I may want to make a program that browses a forum searching for times people use a certain key-phrase or key-word, then responds. I could do this by emulating keyboard and mouse commands, but I wouldn't be able to use the computer while it was running, plus it would be extremely difficult to get it to read the words straight off the webpage.
I was wondering if anyone knew of any module that allows you to send simple data to a webpage to do small tasks, such as filling in a form or clicking a hyperlink?
If an example could be provided too, that would be helpful.

You can try mechanize library - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mechanize/
It gives you DOM-level page manipulation (you can select particular forms, fill them in, submit data etc), can navigate/submit forms, handle cookies and do many things and I think this is just what you want - behaving just like typical user.
I used it for my bot to process through facebook OAuth and it did just fine.

Related

Any possible way to save webpage state to HDD?

Essentially what I want to do is be able to click a button and have the webpage state be stored somewhere on the HDD so it doesn't need to just sit in RAM, and when it's loaded again at some later time the page pops up exactly as it was before as if it had never been closed without the need to download anything over the internet to restore it (although additional resource requests that didn't exist when the page was saved should still download properly).
(as an example, firefox does this when it crashes, all the tabs are restored, text you've typed is still in the textboxes, etc..)
I don't care if that button is in a firefox plugin, chrome, or even a custom browser that I program myself with something like webkit perhaps.
I've been trying for days to find a way to do this. I made WebKit programs in both C++ and Python but every time I think I'm getting close there is some deficiency in webkit or a build-in security measure that prevents me from doing this. I tried creating MHTML archives but they don't allow javascript to download new data over the internet, I tried pickling the entire WebKit.WebView object in python, I tried looking through webkit code to see if I could patch the behavior into the source code myself
I'm running out of ideas and the only one I see left is to just post this online. Is there any way that I can do this, in any programming or scripting language, using any libraries at all?
I just have no idea where to turn next.

How can I program a macro that will do the clicking for me in a web game?

I'm currently playing Mr. Mine and I'm lazy to click 'sell' every 1~2 minutes.
I could use a mouse macro program that I can make the computer to do the clicking for me but this sounds like an inelegant method.
I was thinking about some way I could make a code that will hack into the web browser with the web game on and somehow send some kind of 'request' to the server that will sell the minerals.
I mean, after all, clicking it by hand eventually will send some request to the server so why not do this sending through a preprogrammed code?
I know my question is broad, so let me ask a few questions that will give me a lead to start on my project.
What to I need to learn to understand the 'sending request' part?
Is there anyone or any script that has already done what I want to do?
I'd like to take a look at the source code. (it's okay even if its not Mr.Mine. any other web game would also be of help)
Also, I'm currently interested in python so if there's any example in python, I'd be really thankful.
update: "I've solved the problem"
I'm just writing how I solved the problem just in case some other folk who just started Mr.Mine faces the same laziness that I did.
As it turns out, Mr.Mine doesn't actually exchange packets with its server. It only uses internet connection for initial loading of images and all that.(I think it is..)
If you right click on the Mr.Mine web page and view the html code of it, you'll find that its full of javascripts.
After roughly reading through these javascripts, my theory that this game doesn't rely much on packet data became more persuasive.
Anyway that's why I approached my problem at a javascript perspective and I finally got a solution
What you need to do is utilize chrome's developer tools.(I'm a chrome user)
You can access to this tool also simply by: from the mr.mine web page, right click anywhere -> click the very last button. Then you'll see some panel popping up at the bottom of the screen.
this tool enables you to fiddle with the html code or javascript in it.
I'm not good at this either since this is my first time actually using it for a practical purpose.
I just managed to scrape enough knowledge about this by googling to satisfy my needs.
In this new panel, at the top menubar, there's the 'Console' tab on the very right.
Click this and you'll see a command console.
This is where you can execute java commands within the javascript of the webpage.
Well from here, its strictly 'Mr.Mine' related.
From my previous rough reading of the javascript, I found that the sell buttons have been given the ID such as 'SB2', 'SB3', 'SB4', and so on.
So what I did was just type
setInterval(document.getElementById("SB2").onclick, 300);
at the command line and pressed enter.
this command will automatically press the SB2 button(which corresponds to 'Coal') every 0.3 seconds.
*Caution: you must have the 'selling' page opened when this code is executed. I found out that if the 'sell' page is not opened, the code doesn't work.
*Caution2: another funny thing is, even within the 'sell' page, if you transfer to the 'sell isotope' page, it will automatically sell Uranium 238. That's because the SB2 button corresponds to Uranium 238 in 'sell isotope' tab. So be careful!
*Caution3: if you do this, an error popup will constantly come up. I just enabled the 'never show this popup' checkbox and after that it just worked fine. But one side effect: the usual popup that came up after pressing the 'save' button no longer appeared... but its worth the sacrifice isn't it?
anyway, if you want to automatically sell other ores, all you have to do is type similar codes like:
setInterval(document.getElementById("SB3").onclick, 300);
setInterval(document.getElementById("SB4").onclick, 300);
... etc.
see that just changing the number after "SB" corresponds to the next ore(isotope) in the list.
Well, thanks for reading this much, and I hope other Mr.Mine users can be creative and do more through this technique.
You could use a packet capturing tool such as wireshark. With that figure out the format and data that the game sends to the server.
Once your know the structure you could write your script to intercept your game traffic, add the needed parameters and send requests on a timed basis. (This is all assuming it does encrypt its network traffic, in which case this may be a bit more difficult)
You may find some additional information with this search.
perhaps you can use http://www.sikuli.org/. i have successfully used this to do a fairly complicated automation routine for eve online.

Python Image processing screenshots

I'm trying to write a program than will detect when my mouse pointer will change icon and automatically send out a mouse click. Is there a better way to do this than to take screenshots and parse the image for the mouse icon?
EDIT:
I'm running my program on windows 7.
I'm trying to learn some image processing and make a simple flash game i made automated.
Rules: when the curses changes shape, click to get a point.
Also what imaging modules for python will allow you to take a specific size screenshot not just the whole screen? This question has moved to a new thread: "Taking Screen shots of specific size"
The way to do this in Windows is to install either a global message hook with SetWindowsHookEx or SetWinEventHook. (Alternatively, you could build a DLL that embeds Python and hooks into the browser or its Flash wrapper app and do it less intrusively from within the app, but that's much more work.)
The message you want is WM_SETCURSOR. Note that this is the message sent by Windows to the app to ask whether it wants to change the cursor, not a message sent when the cursor changes. So, IIRC, you will want to put a WH_CALLWNDPROC and a WH_CALLWNDPROCRET and check GetCursorInfo before and after to see if the app has done so.
So, how do you do this from Python? Honestly, if you don't already know both win32api and friends from the pywin32 package, and how to write Windows message procs in some language, you probably don't want to. If you do want to, I'd start off with the (abandoned) pyHook project from UNC Assist. Even if you can't get it working, it's full of useful source code.
You should also search SO for [python] SetWinEventHook and [python] SetWindowsHookEx, and google around a bit; there are some examples out there (I even wrote one here somewhere…)
You can look at higher-level wrapper frameworks like pywinauto and winGuiAuto, but as far as I know, none of them has much help for capturing events.
I believe there are other tools, maybe AutoIt, that have all the functionality you need, but not in Python module. (AutoIt, for example, has its own VB-like scripting language instead.)

Simulate browser and control programmatically

I am trying to run a headless browser, to which when I pass a URL simulates the entire webpage as it would if run from any of the popular browser. Importantly it must manage to run Adobe Flash Player (and hence flash videos). I have heard things about selenium webkit but I am not sure about its capabilities as I have never used it especially when it comes to handling flash content.
Infact if I were to narrow down the problem, I just want to run a flash content in a web site but out of the internet browsing window under my program (preferably python). If this is possible can someone point me the right approach. Do let me know if any further clarification is needed in the question.
Give a try to http://phantomjs.org/ it works great with a headless webkit and flash.
You could look at http://jeanphix.me/Ghost.py/ to control phantomjs with Python.

How to make PowerBuilder UI testing application?

I'm not familiar with PowerBuilder but I have a task to create Automatic UI Test Application for PB. We've decided to do it in Python with pywinauto and iaccesible libraries. The problem is that some UI elements like newly added lists record can not be accesed from it (even inspect32 can't get it).
Any ideas how to reach this elements and make them testable?
I'm experimenting with code for a tool for automating PowerBuilder-based GUIs as well. From what I can see, your best bet would be to use the PowerBuilder Native Interface (PBNI), and call PowerScript code from within your NVO.
If you like, feel free to send me an email (see my profile for my email address), I'd be interested in exchanging ideas about how to do this.
I didn't use PowerBuilder for a while but I guess that the problem that you are trying to solve is similar to the one I am trying to address for people making projects with SCADA systems like Wonderware Intouch.
The problem with such an application is that there is no API to get or set the value of a control. So a pywinauto approach can't work.
I've made a small tool to simulate the user events and to get the results from a screencapture. I am usig PIL and pytesser ORM for the analysis of the screen captures. It is not the easiest way but it works OK.
The tool is open-source and free of charge and can be downloaded from my website (Sorry in french). You just need an account but it's free as well. Just ask.
If you can read french, here is one article about testing Intouch-based applications
Sorry for the self promotion, but I was facing a similar problem with no solution so I've written my own. Anyway, that's free and open-source...
I've seen in AutomatedQa support that they a recipe recommending using msaa and setting some properties on the controls. I do not know if it works.
If you are testing DataWindows (the class is pbdwxxx, e.g. pbdw110) you will have to use a combination of clicking at specific coordinates and sending Tab keys to get to the control you want. Of course you can also send up and down arrow keys to move among rows. The easiest thing to do is to start with a normal control like an SLE and tab into the DataWindow. The problem is that the DataWindow is essentially just an image. There is no control for a given field until you move the focus there by clicking or tabbing. I've also found that the DataWindow's iAccessible interface is a bit strange. If you ask the DataWindow for the object with focus, you don't get the right answer. If you enumerate through all of the children you can find the one that has focus. If you can modify the source I also advise that you set AccessibleName for your DataWindow controls, otherwise you probably won't be able to identify the controls except by position (by DataWindow controls I mean the ones inside the DataWindow, not the DataWindow itself). If it's an MDI application, you may also find it useful to locate the MicroHelp window (class fnhelpxxx, e.g. fnhelp110, find from the main application window) to help determine your current context.
Edited to add:
Sikuli looks very promising for testing PowerBuilder. It works by recognizing objects on the screen from a saved fragment of screenshot. That is, you take a screenshot of the part of the screen you want it to find.

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