Desktop Automation

PyAutoGUI

PyAutoGUI is a popular library for desktop automation. It allows you to control the mouse and keyboard, take screenshots, and locate images on the screen. With PyAutoGUI, you can automate tasks such as form filling, button clicking, and more.

Features

• Cross-platform support (Windows, macOS, and Linux).
• Functions for mouse movement, clicking, and dragging.
• Keyboard control including typing and hotkeys.
• Screen and image recognition capabilities.

Use Case: Automating the process of navigating through a GUI-based application to generate reports.

Pywinauto

Pywinauto is a set of Python modules for automating GUI testing of Windows applications. It allows you to interact with native dialogs and controls in Windows applications.

Features

• Access to window controls and elements.
• Support for complex window interactions and automation.
• Integration with existing Windows application testing workflows.

Use Case: Automating the testing of a Windows application to ensure that UI elements function correctly after updates.

Web Automation

Selenium

Selenium is a powerful tool for web automation. It is primarily used for testing web applications, but it can also be used for web scraping and automating web interactions.

Features

• Supports multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.).
• Provides WebDriver API for controlling browser actions.
• Allows testing on multiple operating systems.
• Integrates with various testing frameworks (e.g., PyTest).

Use Case: Automating the testing of a web application to ensure that user interactions work correctly across different browsers.

Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is a library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates a parse tree for parsed pages that can be used to extract data from HTML, which is useful for web scraping.

Features

• Easy to use and lightweight.
• Supports various HTML parsers (e.g., lxml).
• Handles messy or malformed HTML.

Use Case: Extracting data from a website to compile a database of product prices.

Requests

Requests is a simple and elegant HTTP library for Python. It allows you to send HTTP/1.1 requests without the need for manual labour.

Features

• User-friendly API.
• Supports various HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.).
• Handles cookies and sessions.

Use Case: Automating the process of sending HTTP requests to interact with a RESTful API.

Scrapy

Scrapy is an open-source and collaborative web crawling framework for Python. It is used to extract data from websites and process it as per requirements.

Features

• Built-in support for handling various protocols.
• Extensible and customizable.
• Built-in support for exporting scraped data in multiple formats (e.g., JSON, CSV).

Use Case: Crawling multiple websites to collect data on job postings.