Selenium Python- If cannot find element, close everything and restart

Question

element = driver.find_element_by_id("user_first_name")

If python cant find the element in the page, what do I add to the code to close the browser/ program and restart everything?

Answer 1

You can use WebdriverWait and wait until the element can be found, or timeout occurred:

from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

try:
    element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(lambda driver: driver.find_element_by_id('user_first_name'))
    # do smth with the found element
except TimeoutException:
    print "Element Not Found"
    driver.close()

---

Another option would be to put the whole opening the browser, getting the page, finding element into a endless while loop from which you would break if element is found:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException

while True:
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()
    driver.get('http://example.com')

    try:
        element = driver.find_element_by_id("user_first_name")
    except NoSuchElementException:
        driver.close()
        continue
    else:
        break

# do smth with the element

Answer 2

If your'e waiting for an Ajax call to be completed you could use waitForElementPresent(locator). see this question for more options for handling the wait.