CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonseleniumxpath
bazinga
bazinga

Reputation: 2250

How to check if a element with specified xpath exists in the html document?

I am working on selenium in python and want to know if a element with th e specified xpath exists in the html page or not. How can I do it?

Sample input: 

chek_if_exists("xpath")

Output: True or False

Upvotes: 3

Views: 13361

Answers (3)

Aleksandr
Aleksandr

Reputation: 1914

Lets say you have link:

  link <-"http://www.skelbiu.lt/skelbimai/diplominiai-lt-4792675.html"

First you get the response:

  response <- GET(link)

Then, load the document:

  doc <- content(response,type="text/html", encoding = "UTF-8")

Next, you want to extract the header of the advertisement. You can check whether the node exist by checking the condition if the length of the text is not equal to 0. If so, then there is such node or text so the "Element does not exist" will be returned.

  name <- ifelse(length(xpathSApply(doc, "//title",xmlValue))!=0,
                        xpathSApply(doc, "//title",xmlValue),
                        "Element does not exist")

The basic idea of this minimal example is to employ ifelse statement and checking the length of the returned attribute content.

HTH

Upvotes: 0

Manu
Manu

Reputation: 2291

You will have to write a function to check if the element exist or not. The method will return True if element exist and False if it fails to find the element and throws the exception.

def hasXpath(xpath):
    try:
        self.browser.find_element_by_xpath(xpath)
        return True
    except:
        return False

Upvotes: 6

Vivek Sable
Vivek Sable

Reputation: 10223

We might be write function which return True is xpath is present

Demo:

content = """<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div class="start">
            <p>I am P</p>
        <div/>
        <div class="start">
            <p>I am P</p>
        <div/>
    </body> 
</html>"""


def isXpath(content, xpath):
    """
        Return True if Xpath present else return False
    """
    import lxml.html as PARSER
    root = PARSER.fromstring(content)
    if root.xpath(xpath):
        return True
    return False

print "Debug 1:", isXpath(content, "//div[@class='start']")

print "Debug 2:", isXpath(content, "//div[@id='start']")

Output:

Debug 1: True
Debug 2: False

We can use following for replace of if loop in above code:

return bool(root.xpath(xpath))

Upvotes: 2

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