Selenium is a popular open-source automation testing framework used for web applications. It allows developers and testers to interact with web browsers programmatically and automate browser actions. Selenium supports multiple programming languages, including Python, Java, C#, Ruby, and more.

To get started with Selenium, you need to follow these steps:

1. Install Selenium: You can use package managers like pip for Python or NuGet for C#. For Python, you can install Selenium using pip with the following command:

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   pip install selenium

2. Download Browser Drivers: Selenium requires browser-specific drivers to interact with browsers. For example, Chrome requires ChromeDriver, Firefox requires GeckoDriver, and so on. Make sure you download the appropriate driver for your chosen browser and place it in a directory accessible to your script.

3. Set Up WebDriver: Depending on the programming language you choose, you need to set up the WebDriver to launch a browser instance. Here’s an example using Python and Chrome:

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   from selenium import webdriver # Replace 'path_to_chromedriver' with the actual path to your chromedriver executable driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='path_to_chromedriver')

4. Automate Browser Actions: You can use Selenium to automate various browser actions like navigating to a URL, filling forms, clicking elements, extracting data, etc. Here’s an example to open a webpage and click a button:

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   from selenium import webdriver driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='path_to_chromedriver') driver.get('https://www.example.com') # Assuming there's a button with ID 'btn-submit', this will click it driver.find_element_by_id('btn-submit').click()

5. Handle Waits: Web applications might have elements that take time to load. To ensure stability in your test scripts, use waits to handle dynamic elements.

6. Perform Assertions (Optional): If you are using Selenium for test automation, you can perform assertions to validate that the expected behavior of your web application is met during the test execution.

Remember to clean up resources after the test is completed:

This is just a basic introduction to get you started with Selenium. As you explore further, you will discover more advanced features and techniques to improve your web automation tests.