How to elegantly handle NoSuchElementElement exception in selenium?

user_9668481 0
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I have around 20 elements to find by xpath. I'm using this.

e1 = element.find_element_by_xpath('.//div[contains(@class, "myclass")]').text

When element is not found, it throws NoSuchElementException.
One solution would be to use: find_elements_by_xpath instead.

e1 = element.find_elements_by_xpath('.//div[contains(@class, "myclass")]')
# Then check for length
if len(e1) > 0:
   text1 = e1[0].text

That's 3 lines of codes for one single element.
If I use try, except as well, there will be 60 lines of code more for such a trivial task.

How to handle this elegantly? Also, is there any way to find text directly from xpath instead of doing element.text like:

# This should return text inside of that element
text = element.find_element_by_xpath('.//div[contains(@class, "myclass")]/text()')
selenium python-3.x python
2 Answers

The simplest and best practice way, according to the Selenium docs, to do this is to use .find_elements() as you suggested just wrap it in a function to make it more reusable, keep your code DRY, and make your code easier to read.

Rather than restricting locators to just XPath, instead use a By in your method.

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

def get_text(element, locator):
    elements = element.find_elements(locator)
    if len(elements) > 0:
        return elements[0].text
    return ""

NOTE: Return "" (empty string) here instead of None. If you return None when it's not found, you will have to check for None when doing something with the return or you'll get an exception.

Then you call it like

e1 = get_text(element, (By.XPATH, './/div[contains(@class, "myclass")]'))

or better yet, use a CSS selector because it's faster, better supported, and in this scenario less likely to give you unintended elements.

e1 = get_text(element, (By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div.myclass"))

Also, you can't use /text() in an XPath in a browser because browsers only support XPath 1.0 and /text() is in a later version.

user_23867740

Essentially, you are writing some code that you expect may cause an exception, so try/except is the right way to handle it. It shouldn't need 60 lines of code, just write and call a function like this, is what I would do:

def text_if_element_found_by_xpath(xpath):
    try:
        text = driver.find_element_by_xpath(xpath).text
        return text
    except NoSuchElementException:
        return ""

Then your code in your test is simply

text1 = text_if_element_found_by_xpath(xpath1)
text2 = text_if_element_found_by_xpath(xpath2)
...

Regarding this:

Also, is there any way to find text directly from xpath instead of doing element.text like:

# This should return text inside of that element
text = element.find_element_by_xpath('.//div[contains(@class, "myclass")]/text()')
  1. I think element.text is the best way to do this. find_element_by_xpath() will always return an element (or cause an exception), not text/a string, so there is no xpath that will just grab the text for you.
  2. Even if it could work, would your example code be preferable to this?
text = element.find_element_by_xpath('.//div[contains(@class, "myclass")]').text
user_81630710
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