Selenium opening pdf in new window

[test]

Hello!
I've been trying to use Selenium as i am unable to figure requests out (kindly help me with requests here).

I am facing the following problem with selenium:
When trying to download pdf files from multiple links on the same page, it opens the pdf in a different window and throws the following error:

Error:
Message: The element reference of <a href="javascript:__doPostBack('dtgReports$ctl03$ctl01','')"> is stale; either the element is no longer attached to the DOM, it is not in the current frame context, or the document has been refreshed

I have tried the following with no success:

profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.set_preference("browser.download.folderList", 2)
profile.set_preference("browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting", False)
profile.set_preference("browser.download.dir", '/home/bunni/Desktop/pat_files')
profile.set_preference("browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk", "application/pdf")
profile.set_preference("browser.helperApps.neverAsk.openFile", "")
profile.set_preference("pdfjs.disables", True)
profile.set_preference("plugin.scan.Acrobat", "99.0")
profile.set_preference("plugin.scan.plid.all", False)
profile.set_preference("browser.download.manager.useWindow", True)
profile.set_preference("plugin.disable_full_page_plugin_for_types", "application/pdf")

browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)

Can someone please help me out here?

[Larz60+]

you will have to send it via Browser action chaining only as selenium opens an anonymous session everytime. So, send click command like this.

from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

ActionChains(driver).send_keys(Keys.COMMAND, "t").perform()

from: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3102...dow-python

[test]

Hello Larz60+, thank you for your time.
The problem i am facing is that the file i need is behind a link of this type:
[html]
<a href="javascript:__doPostBack('xyzz$ctl02$ctl01','')" style="color:Blue;">View</a>
[/html]
Opening it in a new tab doesnt seem to work.
Also, setPreferences() doesn't seem to be working everytime. I understand that some preferences are frozen. Is there any way to unfreeze them and set?
I have tried the following with no success:

profile.DEFAULT_PREFERENCES['frozen']['browser. link. open_newwindow'] =  2 

Kindly advice.

---

I can use a partial workaround of this type:
1) Click the link
2) Let it open in a new window
3) Save it
4) Close the window and go back to the page with links

Forthe above, i have tried the following code:

for link in browser.find_elements_by_link_text('View'):
	curr_handle = browser.current_window_handle
	link.click()
	new_handle = browser.window_handles[-1]
	driver.switch_to_window(new_handle)
	#need to save this file
	driver.close() #this call is throwing an error if i am trying the following next
	driver.switch_to_window(curr_handle)

As setting preferences is not working for some reason, i am looking for other ways to save this file. Is there a way analogous to the way we write files as binaries to download something using requests module?
Any help is welcome :)

[test]

Forthe above, i have tried the following code:

for link in browser.find_elements_by_link_text('View'):
	curr_handle = browser.current_window_handle
	link.click()
	new_handle = browser.window_handles[-1]
	driver.switch_to_window(new_handle)
	#need to save this file
	driver.close() #this call is throwing an error if i am trying the following next
	driver.switch_to_window(curr_handle)

Apparantly this is not working because the page might have been refreshed by the time the new window was closed. A suggested work around is to rebuild the link list by search_elements_by_link_text('linktext') within the loop.
Still having trouble downloading the pdf though. I would like to write it down as a binary instead of having the browser throw boxes at me. Kindly advice :)

---

hello! looking for solution to this:

Still having trouble downloading the pdf though. I would like to write it down as a binary instead of having the browser throw boxes at me. Kindly advice :)

I found the following here

It may not be the most elegant solution, but what worked for me, eventually, was to simply write each byte, one by one, like this:

f = open('report.xls', 'wb')
for uchar in driver.page_source:
    f.write(bytearray([ord(uchar)]))
f.close()

This produced a working Excel file, which I could then open in libreoffice et al.

But when i try to write google.com homepage using this code, it produces the following error:

Error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
ValueError: byte must be in range(0, 256)

Kindly advice :)

[test]

okay, so the type of broser.page_source is str.
I have tried the following to convert it into binary and write it as a pdf file, but no success:

from selenium import webdriver

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
page = browser.get('http://learningstorm.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RMEOJLET-1.pdf')
f = open('try.pdf', 'wb')
a = map(bin, bytearray(browser.page_source, 'utf16'))
for i in a:
    f.write(i)
f.close()

No errors while writing the file, but pdf doesnt open with the error message being:

Error:
File type STL 3D model (binary) (model/x.stl-binary) is not supported

I'm stuck here. Any help is welcome :)

EDIT:
passing the map object to list() and trying to iterate over each byte returns the following error:

Error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

What am i doing wrong?

---

update:
viewing page_source of this pdf link, it looks like a html page and not a pdf file!
what exactly is happening here??

[test]

Here i found the following code:

page_src = br.page_source.encode("utf-8") // support unicode characters
f = open('page.html', 'w')
f.write(page_src)

but the encoding seems to be different from that needed for a pdf file. I'm getting a 'file type not supported' error on trying to see the downloaded file.
I think i'm doing something wrong...downloading a file shouldn't be so difficult..
Any help, welcome

[test]

There seems to be some bug in firefox driver that is not updating user preferences. Tried chrome driver. That works.
Hope this helps someone else too!