(Publish date: 26 July 2019)
WhatsApp Messenger is a freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP service owned by Facebook. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media.
Now a days people use WhatsApp more than other social media for sharing messages. They liked to talk and to share data to their family, friends and their loved ones on WhatsApp. Sometimes people wants to talk with their contacts but they are not online at that time. Some desperate people would keep their contact's chat interface open all the time and keep a track on their online status. I'm one of them. I have also done this kind of stupid stuff. Some people use their WhatsApp messenger for a particular time period in a day. Also, I hate late replies and I usually get a late reply whenever I wanted to talk to this particular person. The problem this girl also caught me up in late replies all the time. So to have a proper conversation I need to know the time she usually comes online at.
I fed up with this. So being a programmer I created a software to track the online status. I used a very simple logic to create script for this purpose. I used Selenium library of python to open WhatsApp web. Selenium is an open-source web-based automation tool. Python language is used with Selenium for testing. It has far less verbose and easy to use than any other programming language. ... Selenium can send the standard Python commands to different browsers, despite variation in their browser's design.
driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install())
driver.get("https://web.whatsapp.com/")
Then the user have to scan QR code. Then script find the target person by x_arg = '//span[contains(@title, '+ '"' +target + '"'+ ')]'. This is the path of the target. To navigate to that path I used selenium internal function. The code to find the path and to navigate to it is:
x_arg = '//span[contains(@title, '+ '"' +target + '"'+ ')]'
person_title = wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, x_arg)))
print(target)
person_title.click()
Then I used a logic that whenever the target get online/offline the time will be stored in status.txt file. To get the desire output I have used two infinte loops in this. The code for tracking online status is:
while True:
i=0
try:
status = driver.find_element_by_class_name('_315-i').text
i=1
except (NoSuchElementException, StaleElementReferenceException):
status = 'offline'
i=0
if i==1:
playsound('plucky.mp3')
print(datetime.datetime.now())
print(status)
f=open('status.txt','a')
f.write(str(datetime.datetime.now()))
f.write(status)
f.close()
while True:
if i == 1:
try:
re_status = driver.find_element_by_class_name('_315-i').text
continue
except (NoSuchElementException, StaleElementReferenceException):
re_status = 'offline'
break
else:
try:
re_status = driver.find_element_by_class_name('_315-i').text
break
except (NoSuchElementException, StaleElementReferenceException):
re_status = 'offline'
continue
time.sleep(1)
In this code first infinite loop is used to run the software as long as we want. The class where the online status is shown on whatsapp web is _315-i and I take its value by driver.find_element_by_class_name('_315-i').text. Then whenever the person gets online system will make a sound. Then I used a second infinite loop to run the script until the target is online or offline so that the script does not save the online or offline status for every second.
The software I created to use this code is named whatsapp-play. The link of the software is https://github.com/rpotter12/whatsapp-play. And the link of the online status tracking script is https://github.com/rpotter12/whatsapp-play/blob/master/wplay/onlinetracker.py