I was able to get some AMAZING training how to automate Chrome with AutoHotkey from Geekdude!
Many people dislike using IE for web scraping. I’ve covered how to use Selenium to scrape data with AutoHotkey however, a while back, GeekDude wrote a Chrome Class (Github and Forum link)that lets AutoHotkey connect to Chrome w/o any additional software. I asked GeekDude to help us mere-mortals understand how to use his Chrome class. Below are the interviews and notes I wrote after speaking with him.
Web scraping with AutoHotkey has, traditionally, been done with IE because IE has the Microsoft COM object. Unfortunately support for IE 11 is slowly fading away and the new Microsoft Edge browser does not have a COM backbone. This is why learning how to automate Chrome with AutoHotkey is so important! Unfortunately you’ll see that it is much more complicated as Chrome does not have the COM backbone either. 🙁 GeekDude shows us how the majority of web scraping work will need to be done in JavaScript.
GeekDude, thank you so much for taking the time to walk me through this! The entire AutoHotkey community is benefiting from your work and we’re all (me especially) very grateful!
If you’re loving this, please consider donating to GeekDude!
Automate Chrome with AutoHotkey
- Discussion 1: Some background about how we’re connecting to Chrome through the Debug Window
- Discussion 2: Connecting & starting a page in Chrome with AutoHotkey
- Discussion 3: Navigating to a page and Setting text
- Discussion 4: Automating Chrome to Set Text and click a button
- Discussion 5: Getting data from page (part 1)
- Discussion 6: Getting lists from page (part 2)
- Discussion 7: Managing Chrome profiles
- Discussion 8: Handling EventListeners and custom Edit fields
- Short Talk : Jackie shows how to adapt Chrome to drive Edge. Here’s a link to the files he created
- Simple example showing how to use the Chrome library by Isaias Baez
