Catlin AlmightyOatmeal

Using Selenium and Python to screenshot a javascript-heavy page

As websites become more JavaScript heavy, it's harder to automate things like screenshotting for archival purposes. I've seen examples and suggestions to use PhantomJS for visual testing/archiving of websites, but have run into issues such as the non-rendering of webfonts. I've never tried out Selenium until today...and while I'm not thinking about performance implications yet, Selenium seems far more accurate than PhantomJS...which makes sense since it actually opens a real browser. And it's not too hard to script to do complex interactions: here's an [example of how to log in to Twitter, write a tweet, upload an image, and send a tweet via Selenium and DOM element selection](https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/8a6fa49253c1d6a0eb92

	from selenium import webdriver
	from selenium.webdriver import DesiredCapabilities

	desired_capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.PHANTOMJS.copy()
	desired_capabilities['phantomjs.page.customHeaders.User-Agent'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) ' \
	'AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) ' \
	'Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36'
	driver = webdriver.PhantomJS(desired_capabilities=desired_capabilities)