Most of us are adept enough with computers that you know what they can easily do and what they can’t. Invent a new flavor of ice cream? Not easy. Grab the news headlines related to Arduinos from your favorite news feed? Relatively easy. But, of course, the devil is in the details. FreeCodeCamp has a 3-hour course from [Frank Andrade] that dives into the gory details of automating web tasks using Python and a variety of libraries like Path, Xpath, and Selenium. You can watch the course, below.
Topics start off with grabbing tables from websites and PDFs. But it quickly graduates to general-purpose web scraping and even web automation. These techniques can be very useful for testing browser-based applications, too.
By the end, you’ve created an executable that grabs news every day and automatically generates an Excel report. There’s also a little wind down about WhatApp automation. A little something for everyone. We also greatly approved of [Frank]’s workspace which appears in the background. Looks like he would enjoy reading Hackaday.
Honestly, while we’ve seen easier methods of automating the browser, there’s something appealing about having the control something like Python affords. Sure beats building hardware to simulate a human-in-the-loop.
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