Selenium Java - How To Get Captcha Image For User To Manually Enter Value Displayed Before Proceeding With Script

Question

I have code made in selenium webdriver Java using HTML Unit driver I am inputting various fields in that program.

My question is Which language should I use in order to get captcha displayed on the web page opened by HTML unit driver.what I want is that a window should pop up to the user, on this window captcha should be displayed which was opened by html unit driver also this window will also have a text field to input that captcha also, this input field will be linked with webpage's input field of captcha which is currently being processed by html unit driver and once the captcha has been entered by the user rest of the selenium code should be executed.

Initially, I was thinking of using jsoup to get captcha and display it to user but that is not working because both selenium and jsoup are picking different captchas as they start a new connection.

My earlier code was like this

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "D://chromedriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
driver.manage().window().maximize();
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
driver.get("URL abc"); 

Connection conn =  Jsoup.connect("URL abc");
Document d = conn.get();


Element captcha = d.select("#cimage").first();
if (captcha == null) {
    throw new RuntimeException("Unable to find captcha...");
}

// Fetch the captcha image
Connection.Response response = Jsoup //
        .connect(captcha.absUrl("src")) // Extract image absolute URL
        .cookies(conn.response().cookies()) // Grab cookies
        .ignoreContentType(true) // Needed for fetching image
        .execute();

// Load image from Jsoup response
ImageIcon image = new ImageIcon(ImageIO.read(new ByteArrayInputStream(response.bodyAsBytes())));
// Show image
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, image, "Captcha image", JOptionPane.PLAIN_MESSAGE);

Using chrome driver I am getting two different captchas probably because both selenium and jsoup are starting a new connection Below is the image for the same

Any suggestion or examples would be immensely appreciated. Please let me know if any additional information is needed!

Answer 1

You shouldn't mix Selenium driver and Jsoup here. The ChromeDriver has downloaded the page with the captcha image. So it's the ChromeDriver responsibility to give the image.

You can acheive this in two steps:

1. Take a screenshot
2. Extract the subimage of the previous screenshot corresponding to the captcha

Here is an example (tidied) originally posted on Selenium Users Google group :

DownloadImage ( //
     By.xpath("//*[@id='content']/div/div[1]/div/div/div[1]/img"), //
     "D:\\Download\\image.png");

public void DownloadImage(By by,String loc) throws IOException {
    WebElement Image=driver.findElement(by);
    int width=Image.getSize().getWidth();
    int height=Image.getSize().getHeight();

    File screen=((TakesScreenshot)driver).getScreenshotAs(OutputType.FILE);
    BufferedImage img=ImageIO.read(screen);

    BufferedImage dest=img.getSubimage(Image.getLocation().getX(), Image.getLocation().getY(), width, height);
    ImageIO.write(dest, "png", screen);
    File file=new File(loc);
    FileUtils.copyFile(screen,file);
}

Answer 2

Have you considered using a pop up just to let the user know that the captcha needs to be filled in (without the actual image of the captcha displayed)?

User can go and enter the captcha value in the browser and then close the pop up. Selnium can wait until the user closes the pop up before continuing.

If the user has no access to the browser (e.g. running headless or on another machine) you could snapshot the captcha image and display it to the user (or save it in a shared location for the user to open).

If you want to crop the snapshot to just the captcha you will have to write a little bit more code to do so

Answer 3

Most of the companies use captchas in the user registration page of their sites. The purpose of captcha on any webpage is to differentiate human from machine, so as prevent hacking,and protect their websites against bots. So these pages can't be automated fully. In-fact Captcha itself is implemented to prevent automation. Hence can not be automated and not breakable. If any automation program tries to hack any website that company may proceed for legal actions against the hacker. So better do not automate such webpages which have Captcha! Hope this answers your question. Thanks