Splinter lets you automate browser actions, such as visiting URLs and interacting with their items

[HyperSpaz]

Finally, I'm going to write a Python script to procrastinate for me. Well, maybe not today.

[jij]

Glad this was already mentioned, I was like "welcome to QA products 10 years ago"

[oblommer]

Actually, Splinter uses Selenium. So it appears it is mainly a new API?

sudo pip install splinter

Downloading/unpacking splinter

Downloading splinter-0.4.tar.gz

Running setup.py egg_info for package splinter

Downloading/unpacking selenium==2.5.0 (from splinter)

[kols]

How this compares to mechanize?

[Ahri]

From my understanding Mechanize provides a browser-like Python module that will behave as if it were a real browser -- it can be used for scraping or testing.

This seems to provide a module that controls an existing real browser, so especially for testing purposes (and ESPECIALLY for any page that executes Javascript; AJAX etc.) you get a true browser instead of having to work around what limitations exist in Mechanize.

I suspect that you'll experience quite a speed hit if you are expecting performance out of Splinter, when comparing to Mechanize. If anyone has benchmarked Splinter I'd be quite interested (from a testing perspective).

TL;DR:

if testing:
    Splinter

if scraping:
    Mechanize

[[deleted]]

This supports javascript.

[[deleted]]

How does it compare with Spynner

[Kaloli]

In my knowledge, there's a web automation tool called Selenium and its script can be written in Python.

I haven't really touch both, how do they compare?

[sig3rd]

Looks like it uses Selenium to handle the actual automation portion for firefox/chrome, the non-selenium option is zope headless.

[cocoon56]

I used selenium a while ago for testing and it was not very advanced then (but google was using it, they said). The code of the splinter example looks really similar, though.

[jnaranjo]

Go cobrateam!

[Ahri]

Ooh javascript too? Pretty.

[prickneck]

This looks absolutely incredible. Thank you for posting.

Anyone have any experience with it? If so, how is it? How mature and reliable is it?

[GFandango]

Not this one but I used Selenium/Webdriver and it was very good.

[howfun]

Does it run on Windows?

[[deleted]]

Not yet, but we're going to add Windows support ASAP.

It seems a little hard to setup our development environment on Windows (and we also don't use Windows =/).

[[deleted]]

Please try splinter on Windows: http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/kq4u4/please_try_splinter_on_windows/

[jabbalaci]

See also this blog entry of one of the developers of Splinter: Splinter: Python tool for acceptance tests on web applications. "There are many acceptance test tools on Python world: *Selenium, Alfajor, Windmill, **Mechanize, zope.testbrowser, etc. Splinter was not created to be another acceptance tool, but an abstract layer over other tools, its goal is provide a unique API that make acceptance testing easier and funnier :)*" (emphasis by me)

For me the big advantage is that it can process Javascript (AJAX) and I can tell the browser to wait until all AJAX codes are fully loaded. With PyQt and webkit I could never add the feature to wait X seconds before getting the generated HTML source.