Is there a way to perform a mouseover (hover over an element) using Selenium and Python bindings?

Question

Reading here, there apparently used to be a RenderedWebElement class with a hover method. It, however, was exclusively made for Java (I have searched the Python bindings documentation to no avail) and has since been deprecated for Java.

A hover can't be performed using action_chains nor by using a WebElement object either.

Any ideas as to how to do this for Python? I have been here but it uses RenderedWebElement and hence doesn't help too much.

I am using: Python 2.7, Windows Vista, Selenium 2, Python Bindings

EDIT: There is a method mouse_over for a selenium.selenium.selenium object but I cannot figure a way to create an instance without having the stand-alone server running already.

EDIT Please go through the comments of the reply marked as answer just in-case you have misconceptions like I did !

Bereft

Answer 1

To do a hover you need to use the move_to_element method.

Here is an example

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains

firefox = webdriver.Firefox()
firefox.get('http://foo.bar')
element_to_hover_over = firefox.find_element_by_id("baz")

hover = ActionChains(firefox).move_to_element(element_to_hover_over)
hover.perform()

Consolation

the last line should be "hover.perform()" Yes I have tried that out but when I said hover I had this idea that when I hovered over an element it would show me the text which is supposed to be displayed (like if u hover over the "flag" element,just above this comment you get a "Flag this post for serious problems or moderator attention" popout (I dont know what to call it)) Any ideas? – Bereft

that has nothing to do with hovering, the CSS being applied does but what you are after is the title of the element. For that you need to use get_attribute('title') on the WebElement – Consolation

I thought that was the way to get it....was wrong I guess....thanks for giving the right way to go about it! – Bereft

Any idea when this will be supported on mac? I get the "Cannot perform native interaction" error – Leahleahey

to add to my comment from almost a year ago, this appears to be addressed on Mac. I'm using 2.26 python bindings and no longer get "cannot perform native interaction" error – Leahleahey

Answer 2

@AutomatedTester have given the community a great solution!

Below is how I used it.

I used signal to properly quit PhantomJS since it sometimes hangs in the current process.

I prefer to use find_element_by_xpath since xpath can be easily found in chrome.

Here's how:

Right click -> Inspect -> Right click -> Copy -> CopyXpath

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains
import signal

browser = webdriver.PhantomJS()
browser.implicitly_wait(3)

def hover(browser, xpath):
    element_to_hover_over = browser.find_element_by_xpath(xpath)
    hover = ActionChains(browser).move_to_element(element_to_hover_over)
    hover.perform()



browser.service.process.send_signal(signal.SIGTERM)  # kill the specific phantomjs child proc
browser.quit()

Supermundane