Validate urls using Python and Selenium

You can use requests to get the HTTP status code

    import requests    import time     from selenium import webdriver    from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys    user_url = input('Please enter a valid url:')    # send a get request to the page, and if the status code is not OK    # ask for a different url    def valid_url(url):        try:            req = requests.get(url)            while req.status_code != requests.codes['ok']:                  return valid_url(input('Please enter a valid url:'))        except Exception as ex:            print(f'Something went wrong: {ex}')            print('Try again!')            return valid_url(input('Please enter a valid url:'))        return url    url = valid_url(user_url)    driver = webdriver.Chrome()    driver.get(url) # funtion is called here    HEADERS = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.61 Safari/537.36', 'accept': '*/*'}    time.sleep(8)    imagecounter = driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('img')    print('Number of HTML image tags:')    print(len(imagecounter))

To validate a user provided url before proceeding you can use Python's python-requests module to check the request status andyou can use the following solution:

• Code Block:

  from selenium import webdriverimport requestswhile True:    user_url = str(input("Please enter a valid url:"))    req = requests.get(user_url)    if req.status_code != requests.codes['ok']:        print("Not a valid url, please try again...")        continue    else:        breakprint("URL was a valid one... Continuing...")driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'C:\WebDrivers\chromedriver.exe')driver.get(user_url)# perform your rest of the tasks

• Console Output:

  Please enter a valid url:https://www.goodday.comNot a valid url, please try again...Please enter a valid url:https://www.goodday.comNot a valid url, please try again...Please enter a valid url:https://www.goodday.comNot a valid url, please try again...Please enter a valid url:https://www.google.comURL was a valid one... Continuing...DevTools listening on ws://127.0.0.1:54638/devtools/browser/975e0993-166a-4144-a05f-dcfb1d9b29a2

Reference

You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:

• How to pass validated user input with in an input field of a webpage using Selenium and Python
• Start from the beginning using while loop on connection times out using Selenium and Python