Selenium WebDriver cannot click element even though it seems to be visible

Question

Using Python 2, Selenium using Firefox, on this page, I am trying have the driver click the following button (the magnifying glass):

<button id="search-btn" type="button" class="header__user-menu-item header__search-btn">
          <span class="sr-only">Search</span>
          <img src="/sites/default/themes/custom/smp_bootstrap/images/search.svg" class="header__user-menu-icon fa fa-search fa-fw" alt="Search">
        </button>

I use the following code for the XPath of the element, x = '//*[@id="search-btn"]':

x = '//*[@id="search-btn"]'

try:
    element = WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, x)))
except:
    print "Element not clickable"
else:
    found_element = driver.find_element_by_xpath(x)
    try:
        found_element.click()
    except:
        raise

Selenium's common exception EC.element_to_be_clickable doesn't identify the element, nor does visibility_of_element_located nor presence_of_element_located.

Strangely however, at a few occasions the driver has actually been able to identify the element and then perform driver.find_element_by_xpath(x) which appears to find the XPath and .click() the element. At that point everything works. For a second I thought that the script was to quick to execute the operation before the page had loaded, but 5 seconds WebDriverWait is plenty to load the page, and I have an additional page-load-in sleep before that.

The element doesn't seem to be in an IFrame. I have already passed through the "Accept Conditions"-buttons, etc.

I am running the latest versions of Firefox (61.0), Selenium (3.13) and Geckodriver (0.21.0).

What could be the problem here?

@cle-b Firefox. Sorry, will add that to the question. – P A N Jun 29 '18 at 11:48 — P A N, Jun 29 '18 at 11:48
try to use Chrome, in chrome works xpath and id – Druta Ruslan Jun 29 '18 at 11:51 — Druta Ruslan, Jun 29 '18 at 11:51

Druta Ruslan · Answer 1 · 2018-06-29T11:50:36.960

1

if i get element with By.ID not with By.XPATH this works, maybe you give wrong xpath ?

if a use xpath this also work x = '//*[@id="search-btn"]'

id = 'search-btn'
element = WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, id)))
element.click()

edited Jun 29 '18 at 11:50

answered Jun 29 '18 at 11:45

Druta Ruslan

7,171
2
28
38

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 29 '18 at 12:37

1

Instead of targeting the <button> element for a more granular approach you can target the <img> tag as follows:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//img[@class='header__user-menu-icon fa fa-search fa-fw' and @alt='Search']"))).click()

answered Jun 29 '18 at 12:37

undetected Selenium

183,867
41
278
352

Thanks, you're right. I did however try that earlier, and it has no bearing on the issue unfortunately. – P A N Jun 29 '18 at 12:48

P A N · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-24T12:46:41.693

Using Firefox as the driver, I was able to click the element by executing JavaScript:

driver.execute_script("window.document.getElementById('search-btn').click()")

Note that the above is a non-conventional measure, which shouldn't be needed. The other answers are correct and the usual way to do it.

The problem resides with the Selenium driver being unable to identify XPath elements, due to a bug in the current version of geckodriver (0.21.0) combined with Selenium (3.13.0), see: Broken pipe error selenium webdriver, when there is a gap between commands?

I downgraded to geckodriver 0.20.1 to avoid the problem.

Selenium WebDriver cannot click element even though it seems to be visible

3 Answers3