Retrieving the page source of a website under scrutiny is a day-to-day task for most test automation engineers. Analysis of the page source helps eliminate bugs identified during regular website testing, functional testing, or security testing drills. In an extensively complex application testing process, automation test scripts can be written in a way that if errors are detected in the program, then it automatically:
- Saves that particular page’s source code.
- Notifies the person responsible for the URL of the page.
- Extracts the HTML source of a specific element or code-block and delegates it to the responsible authorities if the error has occurred in one particular independent HTML WebElement or code block.
This is an easy way to trace and fix logical and syntactical errors in the front-end code. In this article, we first understand the terminologies involved and explore how to get the page source in Selenium WebDriver using Python.