Intro

Contents

• Intro
• Credits
  • Companies
  • Authors
  • Contributors
• Dependencies
• Feedback
• Install
• API
• Usage
• Interact with the controls
• Running Javascript
• Cook your soup: parsing the HTML
• Running Spynner without X11

Spynner is a stateful programmatic web browser module for Python. It is based upon PyQT and WebKit, so it supports Javascript, AJAX, and every other technology that !WebKit is able to handle (Flash, SVG, ...). Spynner takes advantage of JQuery. a powerful Javascript library that makes the interaction with pages and event simulation really easy.

Using Spynner you would able to simulate a web browser with no GUI (though a browsing window can be opened for debugging purposes), so it may be used to implement crawlers or acceptance testing tools.

Credits

Companies

• Planet Makina Corpus
• Contact us

Authors

• Mathieu Le Marec - Pasquet <kiorky@cryptelium.net>
• Arnau Sanchez <tokland@gmail.com>

Contributors

Dependencies

• Python >=26
• PyQt > 443

Feedback

Open an Issue to report a bug or request a new feature. Other comments and suggestions can be directly emailed to the authors.

Install

• Throught regular easy_install / buildout:

  easy_install spynner
  

• The bleeding edge version is hosted on github:

  git clone http://spynner.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ spynner
  cd spynner
  python setup.py install
  

API

http://tokland.freehostia.com/googlecode/spynner/api/

You can generate the API locally (will create docs/api directory):

python setup.py gen_doc

Usage

A basic example:

import spynner
browser = spynner.Browser()
browser.load("http://www.wordreference.com")
browser.runjs("console.log('I can run Javascript')")
browser.runjs("console.log('I can run jQuery: ' + jQuery('a:first').attr('href'))")
browser.select("#esen")
browser.fill("input[name=enit]", "hola")
browser.click("input[name=b]")
browser.wait_page_load()
print browser.url, browser.html
browser.close()

Sometimes you'll want to see what is going on:

browser = spynner.Browser()
browser.debug_level = spynner.DEBUG
browser.create_webview()
browser.show()

See more examples in the repository: https://github.com/kiorky/spynner/tree/master/examples

Interact with the controls

• See the implementation docstrings or examples !

Running Javascript

Spynner uses jQuery to make Javascript interface easier. By default, two modules are injected to every loaded page:

• JQuery core Amongst other things, it adds the powerful JQuery selectors, which are used internally by some Spynner methods. Of course you can also use jQuery when you inject your own code into a page.
• Simulate jQuery plugin: Makes it possible to simulate mouse and keyboard events (for now spynner uses it only in the _click_ action). Look up the library code to see which kind of events you can fire.

Note that you must use __jQuery(...)_ instead of _jQuery(...)_ or the common shortcut _$(...)_. That prevents name clashing with the jQuery library used by the page.

Cook your soup: parsing the HTML

You can parse the HTML of a webpage with your favorite parsing library BeautifulSoup, lxml ,.. Since we are already using Jquery for Javascript, it feels just natural to work with pyquery, its Python counterpart:

import spynner
import pyquery
browser = spynner.Browser()
...
d = pyquery.Pyquery(browser.html)
d.make_links_absolute(browser.get_url())
href = d("#somelink").attr("href")
browser.download(href, open("/path/outputfile", "w"))

Running Spynner without X11

• Spynner needs a X11 server to run. If you are running it in a server without X11 you must install the virtual Xvfb server. Debian users can use the small wrapper (xvfb-run). If you are not using Debian, you can download it here: http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-x@lists.debian.org/msg69632/x-run

  xvfb-run python myscript_using_spynner.py
  

• You can also use tightvnc.