Red herring for Cygwin users in send_keys docstring

[wemily]

https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/py/_modules/selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.html#WebElement.send_keys

Generally it's better to wrap the file path in one of the methods in os.path to return the actual path to support cross OS testing.

That advice is misleading to Cygwin users getting InvalidArgumentException: File not found from send_keys with Geckodriver, which needs the Windows-style absolute path. On Cygwin, os.path returns Posix-style paths.

>>> os.path.exists("example.jpg")
True
>>> os.path.abspath("example.jpg")
'/home/user1/project2/example.jpg'

>>> file_input = self.driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input[type='file']")
>>> file_input.send_keys(os.path.abspath("example.jpg"))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.py", line 232, in send_keys
    Command.SEND_KEYS_TO_ELEMENT, {"text": "".join(keys_to_typing(value)), "value": keys_to_typing(value)}
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.py", line 395, in _execute
    return self._parent.execute(command, params)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 346, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 245, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidArgumentException: Message: File not found: /home/user1/project2/example.jpg
Stacktrace:
RemoteError@chrome://remote/content/shared/RemoteError.sys.mjs:8:8
WebDriverError@chrome://remote/content/shared/webdriver/Errors.sys.mjs:187:5
InvalidArgumentError@chrome://remote/content/shared/webdriver/Errors.sys.mjs:378:5
interaction.uploadFiles@chrome://remote/content/marionette/interaction.sys.mjs:543:13

>>> path_that_works = ("c:/cygwin" + os.path.abspath("example.jpg")).replace("/", "\\")
>>> file_input.send_keys(path_that_works)
>>>

Also, a syntax error or something is preventing the "Examples" from being formatted as code here:
https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/py/webdriver_remote/selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.html#examples

[diemol]

Would you like to help us improve the documentation? https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/seleniumhq.github.io

[Delta456]

We would need to update the code docs as well as the documentation website.

[wemily]

I'm not sure what the documentation should say in this situation. Since WebDriver is just an interface, it would be weird for the documentation to contain a lot of implementation-specific detail.

I also don't know whether this issue is specific to Geckodriver. Would Chromedriver or another driver handle translating the path? I just don't know, since I have only used Geckodriver, and only for one very specific use case.

My sample code using String.replace("/", "\\") was just to illustrate the difference between the path that Python provides, and the path that Geckodriver needed. That's definitely not the right way to translate any arbitrary path, and I don't think it should go directly into the documentation.

[VietND96]

Instead of String.replace(), using os.path.normpath(path_that_works). Does it return path with \ as expected?

[wemily]

I don't think anything along that line would result in backslashes. Prepending the drive letter (like c: but it could be a different letter) is also crucial.

>>> import os

>>> os.path.normpath("example.jpg")
'example.jpg'

>>> os.path.normpath(os.path.abspath("example.jpg"))
'/home/user1/project2/example.jpg'

>>> os.path.realpath("example.jpg")
'/home/user1/project2/example.jpg'

>>> os.path.sep
'/'

>>> os.sep
'/'

>>> os.name
'posix'

>>> import sys
>>> sys.platform
'cygwin'

This is how I solved it for myself, but that's using a Python library that isn't standard.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/79428932/5848970

One of the other answers there says that the translation really is nontrivial.

[VietND96]

Oh, so I think it is up to the client's implementation. From the documentation, we can specify the detail

[Delta456]

Closing this issue as we have specified the detail in #15275

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