commit dfab927 contains a reference to basestring, which is not in Python 3

[madeleineth]

OS: Ubuntu 14.04
Selenium Version: 2.53.0
Browser: Firefox
Browser Version: 45.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1

It looks like commit dfab927 introduced a reference to basestring, which does not exist in Python 3.4.3.

With Dockerfile:

FROM ubuntu:trusty
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive
RUN apt-get update -qq
RUN apt-get install -qq build-essential python3-pip
RUN apt-get install -qq firefox
RUN pip3 install -U selenium
RUN pip3 list
COPY repro.py /seleniumtest/
CMD /seleniumtest/repro.py

And this repro.py mode 755:

#!/usr/bin/python3
from selenium import webdriver
webdriver.Firefox()

Run:

docker build -t repro .
docker run -t -i  repro

And see:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/seleniumtest/repro.py", line 3, in <module>
    webdriver.Firefox()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 62, in __init__
    firefox_options.binary_location = self.binary if isinstance(self.binary, basestring) else self.binary._get_firefox_start_cmd()
NameError: name 'basestring' is not defined

...which wasn't happening yesterday, before the release of 2.53.0.

[dosyoyas]

Confirmed also in Linux Mint 17, python 3.4.3, selenium 2.53.0

[timgraham]

Looks like other files that use basestring have this at the top:

try:
    basestring
except NameError:  # Python 3.x
    basestring = str

[leviable]

I've created a PR to fix this issue, however the CI checks are failing for other reasons.

[madeleineth]

FYI: If you want to test whether something is one of bytes or unicode in a way that works cleanly in both Python 2 and 3, use isinstance(..., six.string_types).

[madeleineth]

I confirmed that my tests are passing now with Selenium 2.53.1.