How to get first Element of Chrome using Selenium with Python?

Question

Here is what I currently do to get the first element of a page (or parent element):

first_element = page_or_parent.find_element_by_xpath('//*')

The problem I've only just run into recently (Chrome and chromedriver version 84) is that sometimes this throws an exception:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//*"}

Calling the same method again usually retrieves the element so I presume the document tree is temporarily unavailable. However, the web driver log doesn't indicate anything strange:

[1597164661.317][INFO]: [d88526be26bd6364d1b0ed2dab9d5733] COMMAND FindElement {
"using": "xpath",
"value": "//*"
}
[1597164661.317][INFO]: Waiting for pending navigations...
[1597164661.317][INFO]: Done waiting for pending navigations. Status: ok
[1597164661.418][INFO]: Waiting for pending navigations...
[1597164661.418][INFO]: Done waiting for pending navigations. Status: ok
[1597164661.418][INFO]: [d88526be26bd6364d1b0ed2dab9d5733] RESPONSE FindElement ERROR no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//*"}
(Session info: chrome=84.0.4147.89)

My main question is then how to get the first element reliably?

Is there a better way than using an XPath as I am doing? I thought about find_elements_by_xpath() (plural) but if there's a lot of elements then that's likely to generate a lot of data and run much slower. The only solution I can think of currently is to catch the exception if it occurs, wait/sleep, and then try again but that feels very dirty.

Swaroop Humane · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-12 04:52:24Z

2

You have to wait for some time so that the page can load fully and then you can resume your script. or else you can also use the wait as shown below -

# Import 
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 5)

wait.until(expected_conditions.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "Your XPATH")))

edited Aug 12, 2020 at 4:52

answered Aug 11, 2020 at 17:11

Swaroop Humane

1,8541 gold badge9 silver badges19 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

3 Comments

Neil C. Obremski Over a year ago

The page is fully loaded when I encounter the problem; I confirmed that the document ready state is "complete"

Swaroop Humane Over a year ago

Have you tried using the expected_condition mentioned in the above resolution? If yes then what error you are getting? Same "NoSuchElementException"?

Neil C. Obremski Over a year ago

It would work -- it's the same as sleeping which I've already verified. I think this is a Chrome issue on Linux as it's only come up recently for code that has otherwise run non-stop for 2 years. I'm not going to add sleeps into a helper function for getting the first element; so for now I'm just dealing with the exception

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to get first Element of Chrome using Selenium with Python?

1 Answer 1

3 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

3 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related