send_keys() element method – Selenium Python

Selenium’s Python Module is built to perform automated testing with Python. Selenium Python bindings provides a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. To open a webpage using Selenium Python, checkout – Navigating links using get method – Selenium Python . Just being able to go to places isn’t terribly useful. What we’d really like to do is to interact with the pages, or, more specifically, the HTML elements within a page. There are multiple strategies to find an element using Selenium, checkout – Locating Strategies .

Syntax –

element.send_keys("some text")

Example –

<input type="text" name="passwd" id="passwd-id" />

To find an element one needs to use one of the locating strategies, For example,

element = driver.find_element_by_id("passwd-id")
element = driver.find_element_by_name("passwd")
element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@id='passwd-id']")

Also, to find multiple elements, we can use –

elements = driver.find_elements_by_name("passwd")

To enter text into a field, for example,

element.send_keys("some text")

One can simulate pressing the arrow keys by using the “Keys” class:

element.send_keys(" and some", Keys.ARROW_DOWN)

Also note, it is possible to call send_keys on any element, which makes it possible to test keyboard shortcuts such as those used on Gmail. One can easily clear the contents of a text field or textarea with the clear method:

How to use send_keys method in Selenium Python ?

Let’s use https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ to illustrate this method in Selenium Python. Here we get element of search and enter “Arrays” in the same.

Program –

# import webdriver
from selenium import webdriver

# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

# get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")

# get element 
element = driver.find_element_by_id("gsc-i-id2")

# send keys 
element.send_keys("Arrays")

Output-