Try alternative xpaths, or else continue

Question

I have pieced together a web crawler with Selenium that uses XPath to find elements. On the web page I'm scraping, there are two possible layouts that are loaded, depending on the content.

If I run my code on the wrong layout, I get the error: Message: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":

How can I create a try/except (or similar) that tries an alternative xpath, if the first xpath is not present? Or if none is present, continue on to the next section of code?

So is this at core a Python question, how to write exception-handling code? You're looking for a NoSuchElementException (says http://selenium-python.readthedocs.org/en/latest/locating-elements.html). Try the code example at http://stackoverflow.com/a/12150013/423105 — LarsH, Jun 04 '15 at 15:13

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 04 '15 at 15:31

I haven't got experience with Python so I'm not able to write you an example code, but you should create two try/catch (or in this case try/except) block where you try to find your element with find_element_by_xpath. After that catch the NoSuchElementException and you can work with the WebElement(s).

In JAVA it looks something like this:

  Boolean isFirstElementExist, isSecondElementExist = true;
  WebElement firstElement, secondElement;

  try {
    firstElement = driver.findElement(By.xpath("first xpath"));
  } catch (NoSuchElementException e) {
    isFirstElementExist = false;
  }

  try {
    secondElement = driver.findElement(By.xpath("second xpath"));
  } catch (NoSuchElementException e) {
    isSecondElementExist = false;
  }

  //... work with the WebElement

P A N · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-04T10:09:05.517

0

Here is the simple solution:

try:
    element_in_layout_1 = driver.find_element_by_xpath("my_xpath_1")
except:
    try:
        element_in_layout_2 = driver.find_element_by_xpath("my_xpath_2")
    except:
        print "No Element was found"
        pass
    else:
        print "Element in Layout 2 was found"
else:
    print "Element in Layout 1 was found"

edited Jul 04 '16 at 10:09

answered Jul 04 '16 at 10:03

P A N

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Try alternative xpaths, or else continue

2 Answers2