Access nested elements in HTML using Python Selenium

Question

I am trying to automate logging into a website (http://www.phptravels.net/) using Selenium - Python on Chrome. This is an open website used for automation tutorials.

I am trying to click an element to open a drop-down (My Account button at the top navbar) which will then give me the option to login and redirect me to the login page.

The HTML is nested with many div and ul/li tags.

I have tried various lines of code but haven't been able to make much progress.

 driver.find_element_by_id('li_myaccount').click()
 driver.find_element_by_link_text(' Login').click()
 driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='li_myaccount']/ul/li[1]/a").click()

These are some of the examples that I tried out. All of them failed with the error "element not visible".

How do I find those elements? Even the xpath function is throwing this error. I have not added any time wait in my code.

Any ideas how to proceed further?

thebadguy · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-21 03:58:40Z

1

Hope this code will help:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

url="http://www.phptravels.net/"
d=webdriver.Chrome()
d.maximize_window()

d.get(url)


d.find_element(By.LINK_TEXT,'MY ACCOUNT').click()


d.find_element(By.LINK_TEXT,'Login').click()

d.find_element(By.NAME,"username").send_keys("Test")
d.find_element(By.NAME,"password").send_keys("Test")
d.find_element(By.XPATH,"//button[text()='Login']").click()

Use the best available locator on your html page, so that you need not to create xpath of css for simple operations

answered Sep 21, 2017 at 3:58

thebadguy

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2 Comments

kpython Over a year ago

I am just curious - why cant we use the same d.find_element(By.LINK_TEXT, 'Login').click() on the second page? I get element not found error when we try that. Is there any logic to when to use LINK_TEXT or xpath ?

thebadguy Over a year ago

because on second page Login is a button not a link(Hope you are talking about login page)

Andrew Guy · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-21 03:48:07Z

1

You may be having issues with the page not being loaded when you try and find the element of interest. You should use the WebDriverWait class to wait until a given element is present in the page.

Adapted from the docs:

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

# Set up your driver here....

try:
    element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
        EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, 'li_myaccount'))
    )
    element.click()
except:
    #Handle any exceptions here
finally:
    driver.quit()

answered Sep 21, 2017 at 3:48

Andrew Guy

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1 Comment

kpython Over a year ago

Adding the WebDriverWait did not help. I changed the wait time ranging from 10 - 60 but still had the same error

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