Find the name of a link image with Selenium in Python

Question

I have an html file with links and would like to distinguish if a link is an image or if a link is text. I am using Python 3 and Selenium with Firefox or PhantomJS browser. The goal is to have an automatic procedure to go through several hundred html files and find links with images.

What I do: I first focus only on one html file. In a first step I get the names of all images in the html file, where I know that one image is a link and the others are not. I call the images IMAGENAME.

Then I try to derive if one or more of the images is a link. I use:

driver.find_element_by_xpath('(//a[/img[contains(text(),"'+IMAGENAME[j]+'")]])')
or 
driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[/img[contains(@src,IMAGENAME[j])]]') 
or 
driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a/img[contains(@src,IMAGENAME[j])]') 
with j = 0 (image is not a link) and j = 1 (image is a link).

In each case I get the same error message, which tells me that the way I call the image must be wrong:

NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element:...

When I leave the //a part out and use only //img, then I get all images without error message.

What am I doing wrong in calling the image in a link? Is there another way I can do this?

I'm not sure I can correctly understand your goal, but //a[img] will return you links with images and //a[not(img)]- links with text. Note that if you want to use j variable in XPath you should use 'xpath expression with %s variable' % j, but not 'xpath expression with j variable' — Andersson
– Andersson, Commented Jun 13, 2017 at 14:58
If I remember correctly, \\a stands for anchor, whereas you might be looking for href? — nostradamus
– nostradamus, Commented Jun 13, 2017 at 15:01

st0ve · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-13 18:50:28Z

1

If you are just looking for the src attribute for all links that contain images, you could use something like:

imageLinks = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//a//img")
imageNames = []
for element in imageLinks
    imageNames.add(element.get_attribute("src"))

edited Jun 13, 2017 at 18:50

answered Jun 13, 2017 at 18:44

st0ve

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3 Comments

Mel Over a year ago

Hi! Thank you! That's great! I added ':' after the for loop and used 'append' instead of 'add'.

st0ve Over a year ago

Right on! Glad it worked. Sorry about the 'add'. I'm not as familiar with python as I should be.

kekw Over a year ago

still working in 2022 :)

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