Unable to locate element using selenium chrome webdriver in python selenium

Question

I am new to python and trying to do some webscraping but have some real issues. May be you can help me out.

HTML:

The first part of my code looks as follows and works good without having any issues:

driver.get("https:")
login = driver.find_element_by_xpath(email_xpath).send_keys(email)
login = driver.find_element_by_xpath(pwd_xpath).send_keys(pwd)
login = driver.find_element_by_xpath(continue_xpath)
login.click()
time.sleep(10)

email and pwd are variables including my login details. As I said that part works pretty fine.

The issues I have are with the following code line:

search = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/div[1]/div/div[1]/header/div/nav/div[1]/div/div/fieldset/input')

As a result I get this following error:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"/html/body/div[1]/div/div[1]/header/div/nav/div[1]/div/div/fieldset/input"}

I tried and tried but could not solve the problem. I would appreciate it very much, if anyone could help me out. Thank you!

user_7429447 · Answer

To locate the search field you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using css_selector:

search = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("input[name='search-search-field'][data-cy-id='search-search-field']")

Using xpath:

search = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@name='search-search-field' and @data-cy-id='search-search-field']")

Ideally, to locate the element you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using CSS_SELECTOR:

search = WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input[name='search-search-field'][data-cy-id='search-search-field']")))

Using XPATH:

search = WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//input[@name='search-search-field' and @data-cy-id='search-search-field']")))

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

References

You can find a couple of relevant discussions on NoSuchElementException in:

user_7243558 · Answer

The following Xpath will work and is much simpler.

/html/body/div[1]//fieldset/input

user_6793637 · Answer

do not use absolute xpath or css , always use relative as it is more stable

Absolute (Full) xpath will be depended on parent and so if parent changes the locator will fail to find the element

in xpath and css the locator can be used in the form:

//tagname[@attributename="attriubutevalue"]   - Xpath
tagname[attributename="attriubutevalue"]      - CSS

so you can use any attribute , type, name , id ,class, what ever attribute there in your element eg:

//input[@type="search"]  - xpath
input[type="search"]   - css


search = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//input[@type="search"]')

Try wait:

WebDriverWait(driver,15).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//input[@type="search"]')))

Unable to locate element using selenium chrome webdriver in python selenium

3 Answers

References