Interacting with browser that has been garbage collected in try block

Question

I have a selenium browser where I've added options to use my google chrome profile when the browser is opened.
I know there will be an error when trying to create my selenium browser if chrome is opened elsewhere with the same profile.
But despite there being an error the browser still opens

What I want to do is to still be able to interact with this browser, since it still opens with the profile I wanted it to, (and for various reasons I don't want to close my other chrome instances)

I had to through in try and except so the program doesn't stop, but I think the browser gets garbage collected in the try block.

So is there a way to stop this getting garbage collected or can I find all browsers opened by webdriver ?and then set one of them to a new browser

Here's the code:

from selenium import webdriver

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
try:
    chrome_options.add_argument("user-data-dir=C:\\Users\\coderoftheday\\AppData\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User Data\\")
    browser = webdriver.Chrome("chromedriver.exe", options=chrome_options)

except:
    pass

browser.get('https://www.google.co.uk/')

Error:

NameError: name 'browser' is not defined

What's the error with chrome when it tries to open? – DMart Oct 27 '20 at 17:41 — DMart, Oct 27 '20 at 17:41

DMart · Answer 1 · 2020-10-27T18:16:24.443

0

Isn't this just a python variable scope issue? See https://stackoverflow.com/a/25666911/1387701

Simplest solution:

from selenium import webdriver

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
browser = None
try:
    chrome_options.add_argument("user-data-dir=C:\\Users\\coderoftheday\\AppData\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User Data\\")
    browser = webdriver.Chrome("chromedriver.exe", options=chrome_options)

except:
    #code here to kill existing chrome instance
    #retry opening chrome:
    browser = webdriver.Chrome("chromedriver.exe", options=chrome_options)

browser.get('https://www.google.co.uk/')

edited Oct 27 '20 at 18:16

answered Oct 27 '20 at 16:07

DMart

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no since browser will still equate to None after the try and accept, I want the browser to equal the web driver, since despite an error the web driver still opens – coderoftheday Oct 27 '20 at 17:13
yes i tried this initially, the error was ```AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get'``` – coderoftheday Oct 27 '20 at 17:26
its something to with the profile being used already, but I already know how to deal with that error, I just need more than one profile open for a specific reason. – coderoftheday Oct 27 '20 at 17:44
So it should be trivial to catch and kill the existing chrome that is open. Would be helpful to see exact error message you get from chrome. This might be a limition of chrome with regard to user profiles. – DMart Oct 27 '20 at 18:17
this is the error ```selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidArgumentException: Message: invalid argument: user data directory is already in use, please specify a unique value for --user-data-dir argument, or don't use --user-data-dir ``` – coderoftheday Oct 27 '20 at 18:53
you might want to look at the answer here about chrome profiles: https://stackoverflow.com/a/60048564/1387701 – DMart Oct 27 '20 at 19:19

Interacting with browser that has been garbage collected in try block

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