Python | Automating Happy Birthday post on Facebook

            Python | Automating Happy Birthday post on Facebook

As we know Selenium is a tool used for controlling web browsers through a program. It can be used in all browsers, OS, and its program are written in various programming languages i.e Java, Python (all versions). 

Selenium helps us automate any kind of task that we frequently do on our laptops, PCs ranging from using Facebook messenger for texting and WhatsApp also, daily tweeting tweets on Twitter, wishing friends “Happy birthday” on Facebook, googling anything we want to learn, and many more task. All these tasks can be automated using selenium in just a small implementation.

Installation: 

Go to command prompt and put this is in:

pip install selenium

Below are the steps: 

Create a browser object and use the get() function to send a request to the website we want to connect/use.

Find the elements like username and password input boxes, login button, and using the selenium functions like click(), send_keys(), etc to click on buttons and enter username and password respectively.

After that using get() function to send a request to /events/birthdays/ page.

At the top of this page, there is a card of “Today’s Birthdays” which shows a friend’s name whose birthday is today along with an input text box to enter any feed on their timeline.

Using the XPATH of these input text boxes we will send our feed i.e., “Happy Birthday” using the send_keys() function of selenium.

Close the browser.

NOTE: Make a separate test.txt file and put your Facebook password in it before the execution of the below program.

Below is the implementation:  

# importing necessary classes

# from different modules

from selenium import webdriver

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException

from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

import time

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

prefs = {"profile.default_content_setting_values.notifications": 2}

chrome_options.add_experimental_option("prefs", prefs)

browser = webdriver.Chrome("chromedriver.exe")

# open facebook.com using get() method

browser.get('https://www.facebook.com/')

# user_name or e-mail id

username = "agrawal.abhi108@gmail.com"

# getting password from text file

with open('test.txt', 'r') as myfile:

password = myfile.read().replace('\n', '')

print("Let's Begin")

element = browser.find_elements_by_xpath('//*[@id ="email"]')

element[0].send_keys(username)

print("Username Entered")

element = browser.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id ="pass"]')

element.send_keys(password)

print("Password Entered")

# logging in

log_in = browser.find_elements_by_id('loginbutton')

log_in[0].click()

print("Login Successful")

browser.get('https://www.facebook.com/events/birthdays/')

feed = 'Happy Birthday !'

element = browser.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[@class ='enter_submit\

uiTextareaNoResize uiTextareaAutogrow uiStreamInlineTextarea\

inlineReplyTextArea mentionsTextarea textInput']")

cnt = 0

for el in element:

cnt += 1

element_id = str(el.get_attribute('id'))

XPATH = '//*[@id ="' + element_id + '"]'

post_field = browser.find_element_by_xpath(XPATH)

post_field.send_keys(feed)

post_field.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

print("Birthday Wish posted for friend" + str(cnt))

# Close the browser

browser.close()