Selenium won't type to textarea and raises ElementNotInteractableException

Question

This is the HTML code in question:

<textarea rows="1" cols="1" name="text" class=""></textarea>

This is my code:

msgElem = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("textarea[name='text']")
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].click();", msgElem)
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].value = 'Whats up mate, how you doin';", msgElem)
msgElem.submit()

The code executes and nothing happens. I assume it selects the textarea but doesn't type nothing into it? or nothing happens at all. It also finds the element so I assume I don't need to wait for the textarea to be visible. When I don't use js and just do

msgElem = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("textarea[name='text']")
msgElem.send_keys('Whats up mate, how you doin')

It gives me ElementNotInteractableException.

Answer 1

This error message...

ElementNotInteractableException

...implies that the WebDriver instance was unable to interact with the desired element as the Element was Not Interactable.

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Analysis

The Locator Strategy which you have used actually identifies two elements within the HTML DOM and the parent element of the first matching element contains the attribute style="display:none" as follows:

<form action="#" class="usertext cloneable warn-on-unload" onsubmit="return post_form(this, 'comment')" style="display:none" id="form-dyo">
    <input type="hidden" name="thing_id" value="">
    <div class="usertext-edit md-container" style="">
        <div class="md">
            <textarea rows="1" cols="1" name="text" class=""></textarea>
        </div>

Hence you see ElementNotInteractableException.

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Solution

To send a character sequesce to the desired element you need to induce WebDriverWait for the 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, "span.title + div textarea[name='text']"))).send_keys("Sowik")
  

• Using XPATH:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//span[text()='message']//following::div[1]//textarea[@name='text']"))).send_keys("Sowik")
  

• 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