Hover using XPath, Selenium WebDriver, Chrome?

Question

I am very new to Python, still trying to figure everything out.

While trying my hand at web-scraping I got into a problem:

The website requires a sign in and a pop-up shows up as soon as search results page shows up and sometimes while scrolling and looking at results. So I need to press escape and then hover over(or I can click it) the "Sign In" drop-down menu and click: "Sign in" in the drop down menu.

But right now, from an education point of view I wanted to move the mouse to the element using its XPath.

I did the following and it doesn't work.

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

chrome_path = r"C:\Users\------\Desktop\chromedriver.exe"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_path)
driver.get("URL of the webnsite I am scraping")  #sorry had to remove the link :(
driver.maximize_window()


#code below this is not working
action = webdriver.ActionChains(driver)
action.move_to_element((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="user_sign_in"]'))



 #Tried the ones below and they didn't work either
 #driver.move_to_element(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="user_sign_in"]')
 #login_menu = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="user_sign_in"]')))

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-16 17:01:44Z

1

You forgot to apply your actions with perform():

action.move_to_element((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="user_sign_in"]')).perform()

And, you can use the "by id" locator instead - using XPath for such simple location problem is an over-complication:

elm = driver.find_element_by_id("user_sign_in")
action.move_to_element(elm).perform()

If this would still no work, here are the possible reasons:

the element is inside an iframe - switch to it
timing problem - wait for an element to be present/visible

answered Jan 16, 2017 at 17:01

alecxe

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4 Comments

Sid Over a year ago

Thanks, both of the above worked. The second one is what I am using now. Now to figure out how to replace a placeholder text when I get the sign in clicked. It's in a pop up and I can find the xpath and id, however I get the following error: AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'send_keys'

alecxe Over a year ago

@Sid you are probably using the find_elements_* (which returns a list of elements) instead of find_element_* (which returns a single element).

Sid Over a year ago

Thanks, I was making that exact mistake. Now that I changed it got a whole new error: Message: unknown error: cannot focus element The code I used

inputElement = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="lfm"]/div[1]/div[2]')     #driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'Enter your Mobile Number')]")     #driver.find_element_by_id("mobile") inputElement.send_keys('Phone Number') inputElement.submit()

.

Sid Over a year ago

Element I am basing it on: The element I am basing this on:

<input tabindex="1" style="padding-left:119px!important;width:318px!important;background-color:#fff;outline: none;box-sizing: inherit;" id="email" name="mobile" placeholder="Enter your Mobile Number" class="un_s un1_s" value="" onblur="remove_border();" type="text" maxlength="20">

. Thanks for all the help and sorry to take up so much of your time.

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