RSelenium getPageSource() hangs if window is closed

Question

I am trying to get the text on a popup page but sometimes the popup closes by itself. It's no big deal in itself but if I just launched a remDr$getPageSource() it hangs forever. Worse, if I kill it (for example launching with a fork and killing after a few seconds) then any call to remDr will hang forever.

How can I avoid getPageSource to hang (I'm already checking if the pop-up is opened with getWindowHandle just before launching getPageSource, but it's not enough) or kill it nicely ?

My setting: selenium server with firefox on a docker container, client in last R on ubuntu machine.

Answer 1

I couldn't get getPageSource to function correctly, it is actually the selenium server that hangs. I seemed to have much less issues getting the body element first and then extracting the text from that element:

body <- remDr$findElement("tag name","body")
out <- unlist(body$getElementText())