Selenium + PhantomJS in Python 2.7, file upload

I've been struggling with this function for a few hours now and I can't get it to work in any way shape or form.

Assume my element location and image path are correct at all times. (Seriously, I've been going over this for the past 4 hours, it's not the element location and it's not the file path.)

What I started with was a sendkeys to the input element. This gave no error but caused the script to hang for ever; it wouldn't get past it and no images were being uploaded.

I literally tried every single possible variation of the sendkeys method listed on the first 4 pages of Google when looking for "Python PhanthomJS Selenium upload file sendkeys". Back to the drawing board.

Currently I am looking into executing a bit of JavaScript through Python to upload the file, though I have no idea how to go about this.

The page which I am trying to upload to has its form set to hidden and only shows a button which opens an upload dialog on normal browsers. I feel this is why sendkeys was not working.

Can anyone give me some input or suggestions as what to try next? Or how to execute some JavaScript from Python?

EDIT: I learned how to execute JavaScript while using selenium in python and it saved my day. To anyone coming here from google or whatever with the same problem, let me explain what I did: The fact that my .send_keys() was hanging when sending keys to the input[file=input] element had me wondering before I made the topic but since the webdriver was still able to find the element I wasn't thinking too much of it and shrugged it off as something random. Later however I came with a suggestion that because it had a css type display: hidden !important the webdriver might have been able to find it, but not interact with it, and for some reason selenium just decided to hang itself instead of crashing / giving an error. With that in mind I started browsing the docs and found the .execute_script() command, turns out we can use this to run a piece of JavaScript through the webdriver. Why I wanted this, is to see if the class styling had anything to do with it at all, how you ask? Well we can use the following line of code to change the class attribute of the input[type=file] element: document.querySelector("input").className="". This is not the most elegant solution since we are basically deleting the entire class responsible for the display: hidden !important styling. If the class were to hold more important data I'd suggest changing the class instead of renaming it to "" or deleting. Moving on and trying it out, it showed the input button just like I hoped it would! After this I simply re-tried sending the keys and found no problems at all. There is no need for a click, submit or anything. driver.find_element_by_css_selector('input[type=file]').send_keys('path/to/file') However I did note that the way you structure the path seems to be pretty important. For example I am testing on windows and path/to/file did not upload or select any image for me, using path\\to\\file however, worked completely fine.

tldr:

driver.execute_script('document.querySelector("input")').className=""

followed by:

driver.find_element_by_css_selector('input[type=file]').send_keys('path/to/file')

Is what worked for me, and if you are in any alike situation your variation on the script should upload the image as intended.