Playwright Python: Set All <select> Values

Aug 20, 2025 by Kenji Nakamura 49 views

How to Set All <select> Elements to a Specific Value Using Playwright Sync API in Python

Hey everyone! 👋 Ever found yourself needing to set the same value across multiple <select> elements on a webpage using Playwright and Python? It’s a common task when automating web interactions, and today, I’m going to show you exactly how to do it using Playwright’s sync_api. We'll dive deep into a practical approach that not only gets the job done but also ensures your code is clean, efficient, and maintainable. So, let's get started and make those dropdowns behave exactly as we want!

Understanding the Challenge

Before we jump into the code, let's quickly understand the challenge. Imagine you have a webpage with several <select> elements, each representing a dropdown menu. Your goal is to set all of these dropdowns to a specific value—perhaps you're automating a form, setting default preferences, or testing different states of your application. Playwright, with its powerful selectors and synchronous API, makes this task straightforward, but it's essential to know the right techniques to avoid common pitfalls. We need a solution that can efficiently target all the relevant <select> elements and set their values without causing performance issues or flaky tests. This involves using Playwright's selectors effectively and understanding how to interact with form elements in a web page. By mastering this, you’ll be able to handle complex scenarios with ease and ensure your automated scripts are robust and reliable.

Prerequisites

Before we dive into the code, let's make sure we have everything set up correctly. First, you'll need to have Python installed on your system. If you don't already have it, head over to the official Python website and download the latest version. Next up is Playwright. Playwright is a fantastic library for automating browser interactions, and it's what we'll be using to control our web browser and interact with the <select> elements. To install Playwright, you can use pip, the Python package installer. Just open your terminal or command prompt and run pip install playwright. Once Playwright is installed, you'll also need to install the browsers that Playwright can control. You can do this by running playwright install. This command will download the necessary browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. With Python and Playwright installed, you're all set to start automating your web interactions! Having these prerequisites in place ensures that you can follow along with the examples and implement the solution in your own projects. This initial setup is crucial for a smooth automation experience, so let’s make sure we’re all on the same page before moving forward.

Setting Up Playwright

Okay, guys, let's get Playwright up and running! First things first, we need to import the sync_playwright API from the playwright.sync_api module. This is our gateway to all the Playwright goodness. Think of it as the key to unlocking the browser automation magic. Once we've imported the necessary module, we need to use it to launch a browser instance. Playwright supports several browsers, including Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. For this example, let's use Chromium. To launch Chromium, we use the sync_playwright().start() context manager. This ensures that Playwright is properly initialized and cleaned up when we're done. Inside the context manager, we launch the browser using chromium.launch(). This gives us a browser instance that we can use to open pages and interact with web elements. Next, we create a new page using browser.new_page(). This page object is what we'll use to navigate to our target webpage and manipulate the <select> elements. And that's it! We've successfully set up Playwright and are ready to start automating. This setup process is the foundation for all our Playwright scripts, so it's essential to get it right. By following these steps, you'll be well-prepared to tackle any web automation task that comes your way. Remember, a solid setup is half the battle won!

Here’s the basic structure:

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    # Your code here
    browser.close()

Locating the <select> Elements

The next step in our journey is to locate those <select> elements on the page. Playwright provides several ways to select elements, and choosing the right selector can make your code more robust and less prone to breaking when the page structure changes. One common way to select elements is by their CSS class. If your <select> elements have a specific class, you can use a CSS selector to target them. For example, if your <select> elements have the class sc-fzXfMv, you can use the selector .sc-fzXfMv. Another powerful way to select elements is by their role. Playwright has built-in roles for common HTML elements, such as select, button, and link. You can use the page.locator() method with the role option to select elements by their role. For example, to select all <select> elements, you can use page.locator('select'). This approach is often more readable and less likely to break if the CSS classes change. In addition to CSS classes and roles, you can also use other attributes to select elements, such as their id or name. The page.locator() method is incredibly versatile and allows you to construct complex selectors to target exactly the elements you need. By mastering Playwright's selectors, you'll be able to navigate even the most intricate web pages with ease. This is a crucial skill for any web automation enthusiast, so let’s dive in and explore the different options available to us.

Given the example in the prompt, let's assume the <select> elements have a class like sc-fzXfMv. We can use this to locate all such elements:

select_elements = page.locator('select.sc-fzXfMv')

This line uses Playwright’s locator to find all <select> elements with the class sc-fzXfMv. The result, select_elements, is a Locator object that represents a list of elements. This is super handy because Playwright allows us to perform actions on multiple elements at once, which we’ll see in the next section. Using locators is a powerful way to interact with elements on a page because they are lazily evaluated. This means that the elements are not actually located until an action is performed on the locator, which can improve performance and reduce the risk of stale element exceptions. By using locators effectively, you can write more robust and efficient automation scripts. So, let’s move on and see how we can use this locator to set the values of our <select> elements.

Setting the Value

Now comes the fun part: setting the value of all those <select> elements! Playwright makes this incredibly easy with the select_option method. This method allows you to set the selected option in a <select> element by specifying either the value, label, or index of the option. For our task, we want to set all the <select> elements to the same value. To do this, we can use the select_option method on our select_elements locator. We simply pass the value we want to set as an argument, and Playwright will take care of the rest. But here’s the cool part: because select_elements represents a list of elements, Playwright will automatically apply the select_option method to all the elements in the list! This means we can set the value for all the <select> elements with a single line of code. How awesome is that? This is a prime example of Playwright’s elegant and efficient API in action. By leveraging the power of locators and the select_option method, we can perform complex operations with minimal code. This not only makes our scripts easier to read and maintain but also reduces the chances of errors. So, let’s see how this looks in practice and make those dropdowns dance to our tune!

To set all the <select> elements to a specific value, say `