Can't select from a dropdown menu with Selenium and Python

Question

Im really struggling with selecting an item from a drop down menu on a site I'm trying to scrape. The code for the HTML is shown below:

<select id="averagesMP" name="MP" onchange="reQuery(this);" style="width: 150px">
       <option value="" selected="selected"></option>
       <option value="1">1</option>
       <option value="2">2</option>
       <option value="3">3</option>
       <option value="4">4</option>
       <option value="5">5</option>
</select>

I've tried everything I can think of and find on StackOverflow! I've noticed that this seems to work to select the actual drop down box:

select_mp = Select(driver.find_element_by_xpath("//select[@name='MP']"))

but I only assume that works because the code runs and doesn't give any errors. However, I still can't select anything from the dropdown menu. I've tried:

find_element_by_xpath/name/id/tag/value/text
select_mp.select_by_value('2')
select_mp.select_by_visible_text('2')
select_mp.select_by_index(2)
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//select[@name='MP']/option[@value='4']").click()
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//option[@value='4']").click()
driver.find_element_by_id('averagesMP').click()

Does anyone have any advice? I know that this question seems to get asked alot on here, but I've tried everything I've seen in a post and its not working! It doesn't seem like a very complicated dropdown menu, only very elusive.

Some helpful info:

I'm using Safari and SafariDriver

I keep getting an error message of:

raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message:

Check if dropdown is in iframe? If not then you might have to try javascriptexecutor. — Amruta, Aug 21 '20 at 21:22
the site is skedula.com. Its a grading website for teachers. — , Aug 22 '20 at 14:49

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 21 '20 at 22:16

To select the <option> with text as 2 using Selenium you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using CSS_SELECTOR and select_by_visible_text():

select = Select(WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "select#averagesMP[@name='MP']"))))
select.select_by_visible_text('2')

Using XPATH and select_by_value() in a single line:

Select(WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//select[@id='averagesMP' and @name='MP']")))).select_by_value('2')

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
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select

Thanks for getting back to me! It looks like using XPATH is trying to access it, but now I'm getting the following error: Message: Element — , Aug 22 '20 at 14:45

Can't select from a dropdown menu with Selenium and Python

1 Answers1