Python | Automating Happy Birthday post on Facebook using Selenium

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

• Once that’s done, download a web driver for automation. Here, we’ll use chromedriver from http://chromedriver.chromium.org/

Let’s learn how to automate the process of wishing a birthday wish on a Facebook friend’s timeline as a post.

The whole process of this automation can be divided as follows : 

• Log into the Facebook application using credentials like Username and Password.
• Posting a “Happy Birthday” feed on the timeline of those friends whose birthday is today.

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:  

Python3

# 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()