Locating partial link text with python selenium in chrome headless mode

Question

I've finished my automated script with python selenium in Chrome normal mode and everything works great.

Until I decided to make it work in headless mode, so now I cannot locate a partial link text which already works in normal mode.

I'm using this code to open chrome in headless.

option = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
option.headless = True
option.AddArgument("window-size=1200,700");

This the code that I use to locate the element

tmp  = True
while tmp:
    try:
        Confirmm = driver.find_element_by_partial_link_text('Confirm')
        Confirmm.click()
        tmp = False
    except:
        continue

And this is the code of the link text I'm trying to click

<a href="https://temp-mail.org/en/view/346e2949a4a1f77ededd7542ba7947ed" title="" class="viewLink title-subject" data-mail-id="346e2949a4a1f77ededd7542ba7947ed">Confirm your profile</a>

NOTE: the data-mail-id= is not static and changes every time.

I tried to use Javascript but the word I'm willing to click doesn't have an ID, NAME, or TAG-NAME, and the ClassName doesn't work as well.

Any idea how to solve this?

Answer 1

Try to get screen shot of the page and verify whether link is available. Sometimes websites detects headless browsers and displays website differently.

  driver.get_screenshot_as_file(f"screenshot.png")

If the website displayed is different then set custom custom header (as website detects browser is headless using the useragent):

from selenium import webdriver


options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1080")
options.add_argument("--headless")
options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")
options.add_argument(
    "user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.88 Safari/537.36")
browser = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

Also use webdriver wait:

WebDriverWait(driver, 15).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, "Confirm"))).click()

Answer 2

To click on the element with text as Confirm your profile you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using link_text:

  driver.find_element_by_link_text("Confirm your profile").click()
  

• Using partial_link_text:

  driver.find_element_by_partial_link_text("Confirm").click()
  

• Using css_selector:

  driver.find_element_by_css_selector("a.viewLink.title-subject[href^='https://temp-mail.org/en/view']").click()
  

• Using xpath:

  driver.find_element_by_xpath("//a[@class='viewLink title-subject' and starts-with(@href, 'https://temp-mail.org/en/view')][contains(., 'Confirm your profile')]").click()
  

---

Ideally, 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 LINK_TEXT:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.LINK_TEXT, "Confirm your profile"))).click()
  

• Using PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, "Confirm"))).click()
  

• Using CSS_SELECTOR:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a.viewLink.title-subject[href^='https://temp-mail.org/en/view']"))).click()
  

• Using XPATH:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[@class='viewLink title-subject' and starts-with(@href, 'https://temp-mail.org/en/view')][contains(., 'Confirm your profile')]"))).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