How to handle popup dialogs in Playwright?

by scrapecrow Jul 10, 2023

In this guide, we'll explore handling popups in Playwright. To start, let's replicate a dialog example:

Go to any product page one web-scraping.dev
Add the product to the cart
Clear the cart

After following the above steps, you will encounter the below popup window:
cart clear alert as seen on web-scraping.dev/cart

First, we'll start by emulating the above popup event within Playwright:

Python

NodeJS

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=False)
    page = browser.new_page()

    # add something to cart
    page.goto("https://web-scraping.dev/product/1")
    page.click(".add-to-cart")

    # clear out the cart to trigger the popup event
    page.goto("https://web-scraping.dev/cart")
    page.wait_for_selector(".cart-full .cart-item")
    page.click("(//button[contains(text(),'Clear')])[2]")

const { chromium } = require('playwright');

(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch({ headless: false });
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  // add something to cart
  await page.goto('https://web-scraping.dev/product/1');
  await page.click('.add-to-cart');

  // clear out the cart to trigger the popup event
  await page.goto('https://web-scraping.dev/cart');
  await page.waitForSelector('.cart-full .cart-item');
  await page.click("(//button[contains(text(),'Clear')])[2]");


  await browser.close();
})();

Here, start a new Playwright instance, and create a new page. Then, we use the new tab to request the product web page, add it to the cart, and clear it to trigger the popup dialog.

Next, let's intercept the dialog action to handle it:

Python

NodeJS

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

# create a dialog handler that will check message text and press yes/no
def handle_dialog(dialog):
    if "clear your cart" in dialog.message:
        print(f'clicking "Yes" to {dialog.message}')
        dialog.accept()  # press "Yes"
    else:
        dialog.dismiss()  # press "No"
    page.on("dialog", handle_dialog)


with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=False)
    page = browser.new_page()

    # intercept popup dialog with the handle_dialog function
    page.on("dialog", handle_dialog) # new

    # add something to cart
    page.goto("https://web-scraping.dev/product/1")
    page.click(".add-to-cart")

    # clear out the cart to trigger the popup event
    page.goto("https://web-scraping.dev/cart")
    page.wait_for_selector(".cart-full .cart-item")
    page.click("(//button[contains(text(),'Clear')])[2]")

    # verify that cart is clear
    print(f'items in cart: {page.query_selector(".cart-item .cart-title")}')  # should be None

const { chromium } = require('playwright');

(async () => {
    const browser = await chromium.launch({ headless: false });
    const page = await browser.newPage();

    // Create a dialog handler that will check the message text and press Yes/No
    page.on('dialog', async dialog => {
        if (dialog.message().includes('clear your cart')) {
            console.log(`clicking "Yes" to ${dialog.message()}`);
            await dialog.accept(); // press "Yes"
        } else {
            await dialog.dismiss(); // press "No"
        }
    });

    // Add something to cart
    await page.goto('https://web-scraping.dev/product/1');
    await page.click('.add-to-cart');

    // Clear out the cart to trigger the popup event
    await page.goto('https://web-scraping.dev/cart');
    await page.waitForSelector('.cart-full .cart-item');
    await page.click("(//button[contains(text(),'Clear')])[2]");

    // Verify that cart is clear
    const cartItem = await page.$('.cart-item .cart-title');
    console.log(`items in cart: ${cartItem}`);  // should be null

    await browser.close();
})();

Here, we define a handle_dialog function to click the pop up. Then, we intercept the dialog and click the popup with the method: page.on("dialog", handle_dialog).

We can handle popups in Playwright successfully. For further details on web scraping with Playwright, refer to our dedicated guide.

Web Scraping with Playwright and Python

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