CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonselenium
BigMadAndy
BigMadAndy

Reputation: 152

Python Selenium: waiting isn't waiting

I'm designing a web scraper. At a few points I need it to wait for around 10 seconds before jumping to the next action to account for internet connection problems. I want to have a simple implicit wait.

driver.get('MY WEBSITE')

driver.implicitly_wait(10)

menu = driver.find_element_by_link_text("Export")
menu2 = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//td[text()="Data"]')

actions = ActionChains(driver)
actions.move_to_element(menu)
actions.click(menu)
actions.move_to_element(menu2)
actions.click(menu2)
actions.perform()

The only problem is: it's not waiting. I've even tried putting 20 and more secs as the implicitly_wait parameter in order to be completely sure and there was no change. It's opening the website and going directly to search for the two elements. Can anyone explain that please?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 515

Answers (2)

Simon Crane
Simon Crane

Reputation: 2182

From the docs:

An implicit wait tells WebDriver to poll the DOM for a certain amount of time when trying to find any element (or elements) not immediately available. The default setting is 0. Once set, the implicit wait is set for the life of the WebDriver object.

So if the element is immediately available, it won't wait.

Upvotes: 4

Mahrez BenHamad
Mahrez BenHamad

Reputation: 2068

Try to use WebDriverWait :

E.g

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

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://somedomain/url_that_delays_loading")
try:
    element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
        EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "myDynamicElement"))
    )
finally:
    driver.quit()

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions