The goal of this project was to build a simple automated web project with Selenium in both R and Python to be able to compare the different interfaces. I have been using R for longer and wanted see how Python compared. Since Selenium is a Java appplication both languages offer interfaces to Selenium. R interfaces through the aptly named RSelenium package while Python uses selenium.
The other requirement of the project was to create a clickable desktop interface to launch the scripts. I created .bat files to launch the respective scripts since I am using Windows.
The interface and code structure for the two languages are fairly similar as seen in the respective main files. Both languages create a webdriver then issue methods from that driver to find and click elements. Python has a slightly cleaner syntax for this operation. I did run into some issues with R when trying to use a Chrome driver that I resolved by switching to Firefox.
The biggest difference is how the packages interface with the actual webdriver. Python had more complexity up front while R saved the complexity for the backend.
Running RSelenium creates the webdriver but doesn't seem to have a native way to close the actual driver. This led to hanging connections where the Firefox window would get closed and I would be unable to rerun the script due to the open webdriver connection. Initially I was closing and reopening RStudio to solve this. I added non-R approach of:
system("taskkill /im java.exe /f", intern=FALSE, ignore.stdout=FALSE)
system("taskkill /im geckodriver.exe /f", intern=FALSE, ignore.stdout=FALSE)
where I kill both java and geckodriver at the end of the script. The trade off being RSelenium worked out of the box once the library was installed without any additional steps.
The webdriver with Python did not initially work for me, throwing the error "Message: 'geckodriver' executable needs to be in PATH". I duckduckgo'ed this message and found I needed to download the geckodriver.exe and place this file in the home directory. I did not commit this file since this is probably a computer specific error. Once the exe was in the same folder as the script everything worked find and the script closes the port as expected. I did not mess with system environment variables as I don't use Selenium extensively.
The two methods are similar enough for this project where I don't see a clear advantage. Whichever language someone is most comfortable is probably best choice. It was enjoyable to recreate a project across languages though.