What is the best way to check URL change with Selenium in Python?

Question

So, what's I want to do is to run a function on a specific webpage (which is a match with my regex).

Right now I'm checking it every second and it works, but I'm sure that there is a better way (as it's flooding that website with getting requests).

while flag:
    time.sleep(1)
    print(driver.current_url)
    if driver.current_url == "mydesiredURL_by_Regex":
        time.sleep(1)
        myfunction()

I was thinking to do that somehow with WebDriverWait but not really sure how.

According to the official documentation, this is almost exactly what using WebDriverWait does. It checks a condition by default every 0.5s. One advantage is that using a single line with WebDriverWait is more readable than the >5 lines it would take with any other method. — Mattwmaster58
– Mattwmaster58, Commented Mar 22, 2018 at 3:16

Summer · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-21 17:24:01Z

20

This is how I implemented it eventually. Works well for me:

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 5)
desired_url = "https://yourpageaddress"

def wait_for_correct_current_url(desired_url):
    wait.until(
        lambda driver: driver.current_url == desired_url)

answered Mar 21, 2017 at 17:24

Summer

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1 Comment

Gh0sT Over a year ago

This solution worked in my case. current_url = 'yourpageaddress.com/auth/login' desired_url = 'yourpageaddress.com'

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:25:29Z

16

I was thinking to do that somehow with WebDriverWait

Exactly. First of all, see if the built-in Expected Conditions may solve that:

title_is
title_contains

Sample usage:

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

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
wait.until(EC.title_is("title"))
wait.until(EC.title_contains("part of title"))

If not, you can always create a custom Expected Condition to wait for url to match a desired regular expression.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:25

CommunityBot

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answered Mar 30, 2016 at 18:11

alecxe

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2 Comments

gyula Over a year ago

got one more, a bit nooby question. is that timeout neccessary? I mean, maybe that script have to wait about 30 minutes for that expected condition/regex is there a good way to handle that too? thanks

alecxe Over a year ago

@gyula from what I recall, the timeout is required..either set it to a large value, or use the "while true" approach..

Hatya · Accepted Answer · 2018-03-09 15:13:32Z

6

To really know that the URL has changed, you need to know the old one. Using WebDriverWait the implementation in Java would be something like:

wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.not(ExpectedConditions.urlToBe(oldUrl)));

I know the question is for Python, but it's probably easy to translate.

answered Mar 9, 2018 at 15:13

Hatya

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1 Comment

Robert Over a year ago

Actually, in Python you can use EC.url_changes(url) which returns True as soon as driver.current_url is not equal to url (anymore). So no need to negate EC.url_to_be.

Corey Goldberg · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-01 15:35:01Z

6

Here is an example using WebdriverWait with expected_conditions:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC 

url = 'https://example.com/before'
changed_url = 'https://example.com/after'

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get(url)

# wait up to 10 secs for the url to change or else `TimeOutException` is raised.
WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.url_changes(changed_url))

answered Sep 1, 2018 at 15:35

Corey Goldberg

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1 Comment

Primoz Over a year ago

For me it works with just waiting until the current URL changes, without needing to know the target URL: WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.url_changes(driver.current_url))

Aseem · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-15 20:56:19Z

1

Use url_matches Link to match a regex pattern with a url. It does re.search(pattern, url)

from selenium import webdriver
import re
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

pattern='https://www.example.com/'
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
wait = WebDriverWait(driver,10)

wait.until(EC.url_matches(pattern))

edited Sep 15, 2020 at 20:56

answered Sep 15, 2020 at 18:47

Aseem

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Comments

Tawfiq Khalilieh · Accepted Answer · 2023-03-20 18:34:33Z

1

I just used while loop

prev_url = str(driver.current_url)
driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, '[data-cy="sidebar-game-over-new-game-button"]').click()
    while prev_url == str(driver.current_url):
        pass

answered Mar 20, 2023 at 18:34

Tawfiq Khalilieh

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1 Comment

Adriaan Over a year ago

Please read How to Answer and edit your answer to contain an explanation as to why this code would actually solve the problem at hand. Always remember that you're not only solving the problem, but are also educating the OP and any future readers of this post.

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