How to explicitly write a Selenium WebDriver screenshot to a directory in python

Question

I am working on Win7 with PyCharm3. I have a functional test 'y1.py' which I have exported from the selenium IDE. It contains:

class Y1(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()
        self.driver.implicitly_wait(30)
        self.base_url = "https://www.yahoo.com/"
        self.verificationErrors = []
        self.accept_next_alert = True

    def test_y1(self):
        driver = self.driver
        driver.get(self.base_url)
        driver.find_element_by_link_text("Weather").click()
        driver.get_screenshot_as_file('foo.png')    

    def tearDown(self):
        self.driver.quit()
        self.assertEqual([], self.verificationErrors)    

if __name__ == "__main__":
    unittest.main()

When I run the script from the pycharm manage.py tool I realized that the screenshots are being saved to

PyCharm 3.0.1\jre\jre\bin"

Also, for some reason specifying the path explicitly does not work :

(driver.get_screenshot_as_file('c/foo1.png') ).

I've tried variations of this based on Webdriver Screenshot, but can't get it to work. How could I use python to directly save the screenshot to a directory "screenshots" under my project root?

Edit:

I realized that there is a difference b/w the command line's manage.py and pycharm's tools->manage.py ( which is what I've been using ). When you run it from the command line the tests run much faster and the screenshot saves in the project's root directory ( which is what I wanted ). Hope this helps someone. - Bill

did you really try `c/foo1.png`? this is not a valid path.. how about `C:\\foo1.png` — ddavison, Jan 31 '14 at 18:17
I did try this and others in the post above. Please see edit. — user1592380, Jan 31 '14 at 20:10

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 18 '14 at 11:49

I didn't have success with get_screenshot_as_file() but I offer an alternative using get_screenshot_as_base64(). Define this function in another module:

def save_screenshot(self, driver, file_name_prefix):
    img_str64 = driver.get_screenshot_as_base64()
    f = open("screenshots/%s.png" % file_name_prefix, "wb")
    f.write(img_str64.decode("base64"))
    f.close()

Then, in the test replace

driver.get_screenshot_as_file('foo.png')

module_containing_this_function.save_screenshot("foo")

How to explicitly write a Selenium WebDriver screenshot to a directory in python

1 Answers1