CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonseleniumselenium-webdriverxpathwebdriverwait
jonpie
jonpie

Reputation: 31

Copy xpath Doesn't Provide Correct xpath?

I've been trying to click a button using selenium package in python. I've been having trouble figuring out how to identify the button, though. After way too much time, I tried manually copying the xpath from the javascript console, but get a NoSuchElementException when I try to call driver.find_element_from_xpath('<xpath>').

I'm really not sure how that's possible. The HTML is extremely long - what I'm ultimately trying to locate is nested under multiple table, body, td, tr tags. Here's the element though:

<a href="Javascript:void" onclick="javascript:toggleDisplay(this, trAK);return false;">Alaska</a>

When I clicked "Copy Xpath" in Chrome, it returned this string: //*[@id="Form1"]/table/tbody/tr[3]/td/table/tbody/tr[1]/td/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr[2]/td/table/tbody/tr[5]/td/table/tbody/tr[3]/td/table[1]/tbody/tr[1]/td[2]/a

I'm pretty new to this so can anyone help me understand why this won't work and/or what I could do to fix it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 831

Answers (1)

undetected Selenium
undetected Selenium

Reputation: 193088

The desired element is a JavaScript enabled element so to click() on the element you have to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

  • Using LINK_TEXT:

    WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.LINK_TEXT, "Alaska"))).click()

  • Using (logical) XPATH (instead of absolute xpath):

    WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[contains(@onclick, 'toggleDisplay') and text()='Alaska']"))).click()

  • Note : You have to add the following imports :

    from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

Upvotes: 1

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