Find an element by part of the href attribute

Question

I am trying to auto-open any contacts menu on the page: as example I am going to "http://www.bawnlodge.co.uk/" page - then I would like to click on "Contact" tab

ATM I tried various approaches like:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'onta')]").click()

or

driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[contains(@href, "onta")]').click()

(and few similar)

however so far, I was unable to click the element

I would be grateful if anyone could explain me why I am failing here :/

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 13 '19 at 08:00

Try WebDriverWait and follwoing locator strategy.

element=WebDriverWait(driver,30).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH,'//div[@class="right"]//ul[@id="menu-header-right"]//li/a[contains(.,"Contact")]')))
element.click()

You need to have following imports to work above code.

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

QHarr · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-13T09:49:15.583

You could use a faster class or id css selector

WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.menu-item-26 a'))).click()

or

WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, '#menu-item-100 a'))).click()

You could also simply concatenate the string "contact" onto "http://www.bawnlodge.co.uk/" and .get to that. Multi word tab names are joined by "-" e.g. lodge-bar-and-kitchen. Everything is lowercase.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 13 '19 at 19:37

To invoke click() on the element with text as CONTACT using part of the href attribute you need to induce WebDriverWait for the desired element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using CSS_SELECTOR:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div.container a[href*='contact']"))).click()

Using XPATH:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//div[@class='container']//a[contains(@href, 'contact')]"))).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

Find an element by part of the href attribute

3 Answers3