No, Selenium cannot automatically handle captcha challenges while web scraping.
CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". As the name suggests, it is a tool designed to prevent automated systems from accessing or interacting with a website. It is specifically created to stop bots, including web scraping bots.
Selenium is a powerful tool for controlling a web browser through the program. It is functional for all browsers, works on all major OS and its scripts are written in various languages i.e Python, Java, C#, etc.
However, Selenium cannot solve CAPTCHA tests because CAPTCHA is designed to protect websites from scraping and spamming by posing tests that humans should pass, but robots should fail. Selenium, being an automated tool, falls under the category of bots that CAPTCHAs aim to block.
For example, if you are trying to login into a website and you are faced with a CAPTCHA, your Selenium script would not be able to pass this point:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('http://www.example.com')
username = driver.find_element_by_name('username')
username.send_keys('myusername')
password = driver.find_element_by_name('password')
password.send_keys('mypassword')
captcha = driver.find_element_by_name('captcha') # Selenium will fail here
captcha.send_keys('????') # What to put here?
submit = driver.find_element_by_name('submit')
submit.click()
In this case, your script would be stuck at the point of the CAPTCHA because Selenium cannot solve it.
