How can I make Selenium click on a href by css selector?

Question

I have been trying to make a Selenium bot that searches for a word on github, clicks on the first link and then downloads it with Python 3.8 and I got stuck with making the bot click on the hyperlink. I understand that I can make the bot click on it with driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "Xpath").click() but I want to be able to find the path of the href with another method for the sake of learning, in this case CSS_SELECTOR. Source code of the first hyperlink result is like this:

HTML:

source code

Since every single result is under the same "a" selector with a class of "v-align-middle", I thought of using this code: driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".v-align-middle").click() but it did not seem to work. What am I missing?

The xpath that worked for me was "//*[@id='js-pjax-container']/div/div[3]/div/ul/li[1]/div[2]/div[1]/div[1]/a" which I gathered from copying the xpath from the part of the source code where href is included. — KayB
– KayB, Commented Mar 18, 2022 at 23:35

undetected Selenium · Accepted Answer · 2022-03-18 23:22:45Z

1

The desired element is a dynamic element, so to click() on the element you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following locator strategies:

Using CSS_SELECTOR:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a.v-align-middle[href='/asdf-vm/asdf'][data-hydro-click][data-hydro-click-hmac]"))).click()

Using XPATH:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[@class='v-align-middle' and @href='/asdf-vm/asdf'][@data-hydro-click and @data-hydro-click-hmac]"))).click()

Note: You have to add the following imports :

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

answered Mar 18, 2022 at 23:22

undetected Selenium

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3 Comments

KayB Over a year ago

Although you stated that what I want to interact with is dynamic, isn't there a way that I can simply treat it as "the first result to show up" and use no specific code that involves "href='/asdf-vm/asdf'" because the part that comes after href= is going to change for every result.

undetected Selenium Over a year ago

Incase value of href attribute is dynamic, then you have to drop the attribute from the locator strategies

KayB Over a year ago

I have just managed to solve it the way I want. It seems that driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a.v-align-middle").click() works with the current version of Selenium instead of the one I was trying.

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