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To install this Python package for RPA (robotic process automation) -

pip install rpa

To use it in Jupyter notebook, Python script or interactive shell -

importrpaasr

Notes on operating systems and optional visual automation mode -

• 🏳️‍🌈Windows - if visual automation is faulty, try setting your display zoom level to recommended % or 100%
• 🍎macOS - due to tighter security,install PHP manually and see solutions forPhantomJS andJava popups
• 🐧Linux - visual automation mode requires special setup on Linux, see how toinstall OpenCV and Tesseract
• 🍇Raspberry Pi -use this setup guide to run the package on Raspberry Pies (low-cost automation servers)

RPA for Python's simple and powerful API makes robotic process automation fun! You can use it to quickly automate away repetitive time-consuming tasks on websites, desktop applications, or the command line.

As a token of my appreciation, any new bug reported will be appreciated with a US$200 gift card from your preferred merchant. Any feature suggestion accepted will be appreciated with a US$100 gift card.

r.init()r.url('https://duckduckgo.com')r.type('//*[@name="q"]','decentralisation[enter]')r.wait()# ensure results are fully loadedr.snap('page','results.png')r.close()

r.init(visual_automation=True)r.dclick('outlook_icon.png')r.click('new_mail.png')...r.type('message_box.png','Hi Gillian,[enter]This is ...')r.click('send_button.png')r.close()

r.init(visual_automation=True,chrome_browser=False)print(r.read('pdf_report_window.png'))print(r.read('image_preview.png'))r.hover('anchor_element.png')print(r.read(r.mouse_x(),r.mouse_y(),r.mouse_x()+400,r.mouse_y()+200))r.close()

r.init(visual_automation=True,chrome_browser=False)r.keyboard('[cmd][space]')r.keyboard('safari[enter]')r.keyboard('[cmd]t')r.keyboard('snatcher[enter]')r.wait(2.5)r.snap('page.png','results.png')r.close()

r.init(visual_automation=True)r.type(600,300,'neo kobe city')r.click(900,300)r.snap('page.png','results.png')r.hover('button_to_drag.png')r.mouse('down')r.hover(r.mouse_x()+300,r.mouse_y())r.mouse('up')r.close()

Notes • Element Identifiers • Core Functions • Basic Functions • Pro Functions • Helper Functions

Seesample Python script, theRPA Challenge solution, andRedMart groceries example. To automate Chrome browser invisibly, useheadless mode. To run 10X faster instead of normal human speed, useturbo mode (read the caveats!). Some CAPTCHAs can be solved using services like2Captcha,Capsolver or directly byreplicating user actions.

You can even run RPA on your phone browserusing this Colab notebook (eg datascraping with up to 5 Colab sessions). By design this package hasenterprise security and you can install, update and use itwithout the internet.

Fully control error handling bysetting error(True) to raise Python exception on error, and manage with try-except. For fine-grained control on web browser file download location, usedownload_location(). For overriding default folder location to install and invoke TagUI (aforked version optimised for rpa package), usetagui_location().

If you are using non-English operating system and get "invalid continuation byte" error, you can set code page to support UTF-8 or change your Python script's encoding to your OS encoding.See this example for Chinese. Use focus() to make Windows/Mac application windows to be in focus (see here forpywin32 alternative).

Some users might find it interesting or useful to use AI and machine learning (in particular LLM large language models), to help generate a template script, then they make the fine-tuning accordingly.See this issue on some questions that I asked Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and its responses.

An element identifier helps to tell RPA for Python exactly which element on the user interface you want to interact with. For example, //*[@id='email'] is an XPath pointing to the webpage element having the id attribute 'email'.

• 🌐 For web automation, the web element identifier can be XPath selector, CSS selector, or the following attributes - id, name, class, title, aria-label, text(), href, in decreasing order of priority. Recommend writing XPath manually or simply using attributes. There is automatic waiting for an element to appear before timeout happens, and error is returned that the element cannot be found. To change the default timeout of 10 seconds, use timeout(). PS - if you are using a Chrome extension to read XPaths, useSelectorsHub.

• 📸 An element identifier can also be a .png or .bmp image snapshot representing the UI element (can be on desktop applications, terminal window or web browser). If the image file specified does not exist, OCR will be used to search for that text on the screen to act on the UI element containing the text, eg r.click('Submit Form.png'). Transparency (0% opacity) is supported in .png images. x, y coordinates of elements on the screen can be used as well. Notes for visuallyautomating 2 monitors, and macOSRetina display issue.

• 📄 A further image identifier example is a png image of a window (PDF viewer, MS Word, textbox etc) with the center content of the image set as transparent. This allows using read() and snap() to perform OCR and save snapshots of application windows, containers, frames, textboxes with varying content. See thisimage example of a PDF frame with content removed to be transparent. For read() and snap(), x1, y1, x2, y2 coordinates pair can be used to define the region of interest on the screen to perform OCR or capture snapshot.

by default RPA for Python runs at normal human speed, to run 10X faster use init(turbo_mode = True)

to wait for an element to appear until timeout() value, use hover(). to drag-and-drop,do it this way

keyboard() modifiers and special keys -

[shift] [ctrl] [alt] [win] [cmd] [clear] [space] [enter] [backspace] [tab] [esc] [up] [down] [left] [right] [pageup] [pagedown] [delete] [home] [end] [insert] [f1] .. [f15] [printscreen] [scrolllock] [pause] [capslock] [numlock]

to type a large amount of text quickly, use clipboard() and keyboard() to paste instead of type()

TagUI is a leading open-source RPA software 🤖 with tens of thousands of users. It was created in 2016-2017 when I left DBS Bank as a test automation engineer, for a one-year sabbatical to Eastern Europe. Most of its code base was written in Novi Sad Serbia. In 2018, I joined AI Singapore to continue development of TagUI.

Over a few months in 2019, I took on a daddy role full-time, taking care of my newborn baby girl and wife 🤠🤱. In between nannying, I used my time pockets to create this Python package built on TagUI. I hopepip install rpa would make life easier for Python users from different walks of life.

I had been maintaining the package (and aforked version of TagUI optimised for it) in my personal time. But now,Marcelo Cecin,Luis Alejandro,Jozsef Fulop,Tolani Jaiye-Tikolo,Shyan Chua,Laurence Liew,Bala Ranganathan,myself are the new team maintaining this package. We're happy that tens of thousands of people use it 🐍

For technical info, see its intuitive architecture below and ample comments in thissingle-file package.

I would like to credit and express my appreciation to these amazing open-source contributors below ❤️

• TagUI - AI Singapore from Singapore /@aisingapore
• SikuliX - Raimund Hocke from Germany /@RaiMan
• CasperJS - Nicolas Perriault from France /@n1k0
• PhantomJS - Ariya Hidayat from Indonesia /@ariya
• SlimerJS - Laurent Jouanneau from France /@laurentj
• Philip Vollet from Germany, for spreading the word. Philip is a veteran in NLP and open-source. His sharing of RPA for Python helps spread the word to the vast and lovely open-source community aboutpip install rpa.

RPA for Python is open-source software released under Apache 2.0 license

I rarely make product recommendations, other than theamazing OpenRPA software, and the open-source RPA tools I personally worked on. I'd like to recommendMindly mindmapping app available on phone and macOS.

A mindmap is an intuitive way to store, organise and retrieve info, as it mimics how the mind works - relationships between different concepts and memories. It's perfect to make productive use of time pockets on the go.

Below image is a Mindly example on benefits of coffee. I personally use it to map out my life for the next 13 years, reflect how to be a better husband, keep a list of traditional British foods, store supermarket member barcodes, as well as note-taking on the go. There's even a mindmap for my 3YO daughter to play with, she just enjoys dragging the nodes into the bin. So I created a dummy mindmap on standby that she can destroy.

Best of all, the free version should meet the needs of most users. I have not exceeded the free limit of 100-node per mindmap, but I purchased it quite early on after using it, to support the work of the team behind this app.

PS - I don't know Mindly's team, just recommending the app here because it rocks