AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'click' while trying to loop through the hrefs and click them through Selenium and Python

This error message...

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'click'

...implies that you script/program have attempted to invoke click() on a string object.

What went wrong

As per the line of code:

elem.get_attribute("href").click()

You have extracted the href attribute of the first element from the List elems. get_attribute() method returns a string. String data types can't invoke click() method. Hence you see the error.

Solution

Now, in all possibilities as you are extracting the href attributes and you want to open the Links and a viable solution will be to open the (href) links in the adjacent TABs as follows:

elems = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//a[@href]")
for elem in elems:
    print(elem)
    my_href = elem.get_attribute("href")
    driver.execute_script("window.open('" + my_href +"');")
    # perform your tasks in the new window and switch back to the parent windown for the remaining hrefs

The problem is the get_attribute() method returns the value of the attribute. In this case, the attribute is hrefso, it returned str obj. Note that, the web element elem is clickable. But, if you click on the elem. It will take you to the next page hence, iterating over all these web elements (elems) won't be possible as, driver will move on to next page!

Alternate way, to achieve what you are looking for is to create a list of links and, iterate over it like below:

links = []   
elems = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//a[@href]")
for elem in elems:
    print(elem)
    links.append(elem.get_attribute("href"))

for link in links:
    driver.get(link)
    # do you stuff

This way, we are making sure to collect all the links from the web element list i.e. elems by iterating over it. After collecting all the links and storing them in the list, we iterate over the collected list of urls.

The get_attribute("href") returns the STRING of the url whichever the element is pointing to. If you want to click on the hyperlink element, just do:

for elem in elems:
    print(elem)
    elem.click()
    driver.back() //to go back the previous page and continue over the links

On a sidenote, if you want to print the URL of the hyperlink which you are clicking, you can use your get_attribute() method:

print(elem.get_attribute("href"))