Monday 1:30 p.m.–2:15 p.m.

Automating Your Browser and Desktop Apps

Al Sweigart

Audience level:

Intermediate

Description

There's a lot of data on the web and in your desktop apps, but accessing it can involve a lot of tedious typing and clicking. In this talk Al Sweigart explains web scraping techniques and programmatically controlling the keyboard and mouse to automate these tasks for you. Covers the Requests, Beautiful Soup, Selenium, and PyAutoGUI modules.

Abstract

This talk is an introduction to using the Requests, Beautiful Soup, Selenium, and PyAutoGUI modules in order to automatically grab data from the web or interact with desktop applications.

Attendees will learn:

  • How to download files and pages from the web
  • How to use CSS selectors to find content in a web page
  • How to control a web browser from Python using Selenium
  • How to programmatically control the keyboard and mouse

The content from this talk is derived from Al Sweigart's book, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, which is freely available under a Creative Commons license at http://automatetheboringstuff.com