Python selenium send_keys switches input before finishing first string

Question

I'm writing functional tests against Django's StaticLiveServerTestCase with selenium using the Firefox driver.

For some reason my send_keys is cut off in the middle and the rest sent to another field:

Password field's type set to "text" to show the problem.

Here is my test case that is very close to the example in Django documentation.

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from django.contrib.staticfiles.testing import StaticLiveServerTestCase

from selenium.webdriver.firefox.webdriver import WebDriver

User = get_user_model()

class LoginSpec(StaticLiveServerTestCase):

    @classmethod
    def setUpClass(cls):
        super(LoginSpec, cls).setUpClass()
        cls.selenium = WebDriver()
        User.objects.create_user('username', '[email protected]', 'password')

    @classmethod
    def tearDownClass(cls):
        User.objects.all().delete()
        cls.selenium.quit()
        super(LoginSpec, cls).tearDownClass()

    def test_login_with_valid_credentials(self):
        self.selenium.get('%s%s' % (self.live_server_url,  "/login"))

        username = self.selenium.find_element_by_name("username")
        username.send_keys("username")
        password = self.selenium.find_element_by_name("password")
        password.send_keys("password")
        ...

Answer 1

It looks like (for some reason) something is interpreting the "r" in "username" as a control character (moving focus to the next field), rather than as a regular character.

Two possible workarounds: you could clear() the element before calling send_keys and/or send the letters in your strings one at a time:

def test_login_with_valid_credentials(self):
    self.selenium.get('%s%s' % (self.live_server_url,  "/login"))

    username = self.selenium.find_element_by_name("username")
    username.clear()
    username.send_keys("username")
    # if clear() alone doesn't solve the problem, you might also try:
    # for x in list("username"):
    #     username.send_keys(x)
    password = self.selenium.find_element_by_name("password")
    password().clear
    password.send_keys("password")
    ...

Answer 2

I think the real issue is that selenium continues to the next step in the code before it can finish typing out the send_keys() and it seems unrelated to whether it sees a character as a control character or not. It seems to cut it off before I finish if I have more than one or two characters that I'm trying to send, in my case "HPQ" was being submitted as "HP" or "H". Sending the keys one at a time did the trick for me. Thanks @Daniel for the suggestion.

for c in str_to_send:
    element.send_keys(c)