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pythontestingblack-box

how can i verify all links on a page as a black-box tester

I'm tryng to verify if all my page links are valid, and also something similar to me if all the pages have a specified link like contact. i use python unit testing and selenium IDE to record actions that need to be tested. So my question is can i verify the links in a loop or i need to try every link on my own? i tried to do this with __iter__ but it didn't get any close ,there may be a reason that i'm poor at oop, but i still think that there must me another way of testing links than clicking them and recording one by one.

Solution

  • I would just use standard shell commands for this:

    • You can use wget to detect broken links
    • If you use wget to download the pages, you can then scan the resulting files with grep --files-without-match to find those that don't have a contact link.

    If you're on windows, you can install cygwin or install the win32 ports of these tools.

    EDIT: Embed Info from the use wget to detect broken links link above:

    When ever we release a public site its always a good idea to run a spider on it, this way we can check for broken pages and bad urls. WGET has a recursive download command and mixed with --spider option it will just crawl the site.

    1) Download WGET

    Mac:
    http://www.statusq.org/archives/2008/07/30/1954/
    Or use macports and download wget.

    Windows:
    http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm

    Linux:
    Comes built in
    ----------------------------------------

2) In your console / terminal, run (without the $):

    $ wget --spider -r -o log.txt http://yourdomain.com

3) After that just locate you "log.txt" file and at the very bottom
 of the file will be a list of broken links, how many links there 
are, etc.