Unable to locate element error through Selenium after copying xPath location

Question

Selenium, cannot locate xPath element

I'm a beginner learning Selenium, trying to build a tiny web scraper. First part is to go to the site and click button "Search By Address". I copied the xPath from Inspecting the element in Google Chrome, however, using Selenium to find the element keeps throwing a "unable to locate" error.

from selenium import webdriver
web_Url = 'http://hcad.org/quick-search/'
driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'C:\Users\Jaz\Documents\Python\Modules\geckodriver.exe')
driver.implicitly_wait(10) # this lets webdriver wait 10 seconds for the website to load
driver.get(web_Url)
button = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='s_addr']").click()

Answer 1

The element you are trying to find is inside iframe. First, switch to iframe using 'driver.switchTo().frame()' command and then try to find the element.

More details on switching to iframe is discussed in this article.

from selenium import webdriver
web_Url = 'http://hcad.org/quick-search/'
driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'C:\Users\Jaz\Documents\Python\Modules\geckodriver.exe')
driver.implicitly_wait(10) # this lets webdriver wait 10 seconds for the website to load
driver.get(web_Url)
element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@class='c-general']/iframe")
driver.switch_to_frame(element)
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='s_addr']").click()
driver.switch_to_default_content()

Answer 2

To click() on the element with text as Search By Address as the the desired element is within an <iframe> so you have to:

• Induce WebDriverWait for the desired frame to be available and switch to it.
• Induce WebDriverWait for the desired element to be clickable.

• You can use the following solution:

  • Code Block:

    from selenium import webdriver
    from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
    from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
    from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
    
    driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'C:\Utility\BrowserDrivers\geckodriver.exe')
    driver.get("http://hcad.org/quick-search/")
    WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.frame_to_be_available_and_switch_to_it((By.XPATH,"//iframe[@src='https://public.hcad.org/records/quicksearch.asp']")))
    WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input#s_addr"))).click()
    

• Browser Snapshot:

Here you can find a relevant discussion on Ways to deal with #document under iframe