How to solve captcha in selenium python | Complete Guide 2024

7 min readJul 4, 2024

Hitting a CAPTCHA while performing web automation is something that leaves many people feeling overwhelmed. These CAPTCHAs, specifically designed to differentiate between human users and automated scripts, are undoubtedly a huge challenge to using Selenium for web crawling or automation tasks. 2024’s complete guide will provide you with a comprehensive solution to help you efficiently tackle these obstacles, most notably the two more common types of CAPTCHA, funcaptcha and recaptcha, but of course we also need to incorporate a third-party CAPTCHAs solution tool, CapSolver.

Table of Contents

What is CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA Examples
Prerequisites
Method 1: Solving CAPTCHA via Capsolver API
Method 2: Solving CAPTCHA with Capsolver Extension

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What is CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA requires users to perform specific tasks, such as entering the text displayed in an image or clicking on images from a set that match certain criteria.These tasks are designed to verify whether the user is a human or a robot. Due to the dynamic nature of these tasks, they can only be successfully completed through human cognition and correct interpretation of information — areas where artificial intelligence often struggles.

Some CAPTCHA variants also support visually impaired individuals by generating audio instead of images.

CAPTCHA Examples

Google’s open-source CAPTCHA widget, reCAPTCHA, is widely used because it supports various major screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA for IE, Edge, or Chrome on Windows OS, ChromeVox for Chrome OS, and VoiceOver for Safari and Chrome on Mac OS.

Additionally, FunCaptcha is another common type of CAPTCHA where users need to click on specific images, such as selecting all images containing a particular object, to complete the verification. Normal human users often need to spend up to a minute completing a complex FunCaptcha verification. Both types of CAPTCHA effectively prevent automated script attacks and are widely adopted by many websites.

Prerequisites

Google Chrome: Install the latest version of Chrome, as we will be interacting with Chrome through code.
Python: Ensure you have Python installed, and that the version is 3 or above. Versions below 3 are no longer recommended.
Selenium: The Python library for the automation tool Selenium.
Capsolver Python SDK: The official Capsolver Python SDK, which allows easy integration with Capsolver.
Capsolver Extension: The official Capsolver Chrome extension, which can automatically solve various challenges for you.

Method 1: Solving CAPTCHA via Capsolver API

We’ll use this demo page as an example to demonstrate how to solve reCAPTCHA in Python Selenium using the Capsolver API.

Understanding HTML Forms

Before we start, we need to understand the basics of HTML forms. Observe this page and open the developer tools. Manually solve the reCAPTCHA and then click the Submit button. You will see a POST request sent, submitting three fields: ex-a, ex-b, and g-recaptcha-response, as shown in the image below:

These three fields correspond to two input elements and one textarea element under the form in the initial HTML source code, as shown in the image below:

Our approach is to solve the reCAPTCHA using the Capsolver API, obtain the token, input it into the textarea element, and then click the submit button to submit the form.

Handling Hidden Textarea Elements

When inputting the token into the textarea element, note that the textarea element on the webpage has a CSS style display: none, which means the textarea is not visible. In this case, if you try to input content into the textarea element directly in Selenium, it will throw an error:
selenium.common.exceptions.ElementNotInteractableException: Message: element not interactable, because the textarea element is not interactable at this moment. To solve this, we need to set the CSS style of the textarea element to display: block. The specific operation method will be reflected in the code later.

Getting the Token

Using the Capsolver API requires us to provide the websiteKey, which can be found by searching for the keyword data-sitekey in the page source code:

Using Capsolver Python SDK to Get the Token

Here’s how to get the token using the Capsolver Python SDK:

import capsolver

capsolver.api_key = "your api key"
solution = capsolver.solve({
    "type": "ReCaptchaV2TaskProxyLess",
    "websiteKey": "6LfW6wATAAAAAHLqO2pb8bDBahxlMxNdo9g947u9",
    "websiteURL": "https://recaptcha-demo.appspot.com/recaptcha-v2-checkbox.php",
})
token = solution["gRecaptchaResponse"]
print(token)

Using the Token in Selenium

Next, we need to use the token with Selenium. There are two key operations in Selenium:

Make the textarea element visible so that it can be interacted with and the token can be input into it.
Locate the submit button and click it to submit the form.

These operations involve locating elements and interacting with elements. If you’re not familiar with Selenium, you can refer to Web Scraping with Selenium and Python | Solving Captcha When Web Scraping

Combining with the Capsolver API, the complete code is as follows:

import capsolver
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

# Initialize Chrome Options object and access target website
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)
url = "https://recaptcha-demo.appspot.com/recaptcha-v2-checkbox.php"
driver.get(url)# Calling the Capsolver API to solve ReCaptcha
capsolver.api_key = "your api key"
solution = capsolver.solve({
    "type": "ReCaptchaV2TaskProxyLess",
    "websiteKey": "6LfW6wATAAAAAHLqO2pb8bDBahxlMxNdo9g947u9",
    "websiteURL": url,
})
token = solution["gRecaptchaResponse"]
print(f"Token returned by capsolver: {token}")# Change the display style property of textarea to block to make it visible
driver.execute_script("document.getElementById('g-recaptcha-response').style.display = 'block';")
# Simulate inputting tokens into textarea
textarea = driver.find_element(By.ID, "g-recaptcha-response")
textarea.send_keys(token)# Simulate clicking and submit the form
submit_btn = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "button[type='submit']")
submit_btn.click()
input("Press any key to exit.")
driver.close()

The above code demonstrates how to solve reCAPTCHA using the Capsolver API in Python Selenium. After successfully solving it, you will see the following page:

Method 2: Solving CAPTCHA with Capsolver Extension

Method 1 involved solving CAPTCHA through the Capsolver API, which includes many complex operations. If you are looking for a simpler and more convenient way to solve CAPTCHA, then Capsolver Extension is your best choice. It can easily integrate into browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Capsolver Extension can automatically recognize and solve various CAPTCHA challenges in just a few seconds, without any human intervention, allowing you to enjoy Capsolver’s CAPTCHA solving service without writing any code.

We take FunCaptcha as an example, with the target webpage

Downloading and Repackaging Capsolver Extension

Since we are using Capsolver Extension in Selenium, we need to download the zip file from Capsolver’s official GitHub. Using Capsolver Extension requires you to enter your API key, as shown below:

Interacting with browser extensions in Selenium can be quite cumbersome, so we can pre-fill the API key in the extension’s configuration file and then load it directly in Selenium. Extract the Capsolver Extension zip file we downloaded, and enter your API key in the \assets\config.js file, as shown below:

Next, we use Chrome’s built-in extension packaging feature to repackage the Capsolver Extension. Note that you cannot simply compress the folder back into a zip file; such an extension would be unusable. In Chrome, visit chrome://extensions/, enable developer mode, select the Pack Extension option, and import the entire Capsolver extension folder. After repackaging, you will get a .crx file.

Using Capsolver Extension in Selenium

Use the add_extension method to load the newly repackaged .crx format Capsolver Extension. The sample code is as follows:

from selenium import webdriver

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_extension(r"C:\path\to\CapSolver.Browser.Extension-chrome-v1.14.0.crx")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)
driver.get("https://iframe.arkoselabs.com/3117BF26-4762-4F5A-8ED9-A85E69209A46/index.html")input("Press any key to exit.")
driver.close()

Run the code, and you will see that Capsolver Extension automatically solves the FunCaptcha challenge:

Conclusion

Whether using the Capsolver API or the Capsolver Extension, you can perfectly solve CAPTCHA in Python Selenium. If you have any questions, refer to the Capsolver documentation for more useful information.