How to scrape data from webpage which uses react.js with Selenium in Python?

Question

I am facing some difficulties scraping a website which uses react.js and not sure why this is happening.

This is the html of the website:

What I wish to do is click on the button with the class: play-pause-button btn btn -naked. However, when I load the page with the Mozilla gecko webdriver there is an exception thrown saying

Message: Unable to locate element: .play-pause-button btn btn-naked

which makes me think that maybe I should do something else to get this element? This is my code so far:

driver.get("https://drawittoknowit.com/course/neurological-system/anatomy/peripheral-nervous-system/1332/brachial-plexus---essentials")
    # execute script to scroll down the page
    driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);var lenOfPage=document.body.scrollHeight;return lenOfPage;")
    time.sleep(10)        
    soup = BeautifulSoup(driver.page_source, 'lxml')
    print(driver.page_source)
    play_button = driver.find_element_by_class_name("play-pause-button btn btn-naked").click()
    print(play_button)

Does anyone have an idea as to how I could go about solving this? Any help is much appreciated

Answer 1

Seems you were close. While using find_element_by_class_name() you can't pass multiple classes and you are allowed to pass only one classname, i.e. only only one among either of the following:

• play-pause-button
• btn
• btn-naked

On passing multiple classes through find_element_by_class_name() you will face Message: invalid selector: Compound class names not permitted

---

Solution

As an alternative, as the element is an Angular element, to click() on the element you have to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using CSS_SELECTOR:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "button.play-pause-button.btn.btn-naked")))click()
  

• Using XPATH:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//button[@class='play-pause-button btn btn-naked']")))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