Simple program to access Facebook elements using Selenium Python but getting errors

Question

This is my code:

from selenium import webdriver

import time

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.fb.com")
driver.find_elements_by_name("email").send_keys("******************")
driver.close()

Observation: After execute the program I get error. send_keys() and click() methods are not working.

Does this answer your question? [sendkeys are not working in Selenium Webdriver](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20936403/sendkeys-are-not-working-in-selenium-webdriver) — Banana, Sep 18 '20 at 06:00
Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/dhanvika/PycharmProjects/Italy/sss.py", line 9, in driver.find_elements_by_name("email").send_keys("******************") AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'send_keys' — vivek, Sep 18 '20 at 06:28

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 18 '20 at 06:07

The error is coming because of this line driver.find_elements_by_name("email"). The find_elements command in selenium is used to extract multiple elements with same kind of locators which return a list of objects.

Over here in you case, you are accessing a single element and for the extraction you need to use driver.find_element_by_name("email").

A sample script is given below:

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.fb.com")
driver.find_element_by_name("email").send_keys("******************")
driver.close()

Just a additional information, close() command closes the window under focus and quit() command closes window active in session. So you can use driver.quit() command either.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 18 '20 at 06:12

To get an element after travelling to page we tend to wait for an element to be interactable due to page loading wait time. You also use find_elements and not find_element.

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait 
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.fb.com")
WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.NAME, "email"))).send_keys("*****")
driver.quit()

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 18 '20 at 08:28

Three issues:

you need to find one element not many elements
you need to give time for things to load
don't need to close the driver straight away

try:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import time

driver = webdriver.Chrome()

driver.get("https://www.fb.com")
time.sleep(10)
driver.find_element_by_name("email").send_keys("******************")
time.sleep(1)
driver.find_element_by_name("password").send_keys("******************")
time.sleep(1)
driver.find_element_by_name("password").(keys.Keys.RETURN)

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Feb 22 '21 at 21:55

You need to take care of a lot of things here as follows:

find_elements_by_name() returns a list with elements if any was found or an empty list if not. But moving further as you are trying to invoke send_keys(*value) so you must be looking for an WebElement and use find_element_by_name(name) instead which Finds an element by name.
You haven't used any method from the time module so ideally you need to remove the unused import:
```
import time
```
Invoking https://www.fb.com through get() inturn invokes https://www.facebook.com/. But scraping Facebook is against the TOS 3.2 and you are liable to be questioned and may even land up in Facebook Jail. Use Facebook Graph API instead.
Facebook is built through ReactJS which is pretty much evident from the presence of the following keywords and tags within the HTML DOM:
- {"react_render":true,"reflow":true}
- 
- ["React-prod"]
- ["ReactDOM-prod"]
- ReactComposerTaggerType:{r:["t5r69"],be:1}
So, the dynamically generated class names are bound to change after certain timegaps and you should avoid automating Facebook.

Still if you intend to automate logging into Facebook 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, "input[name='email']"))).send_keys("vivek")

Using XPATH:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//input[@name='email']"))).send_keys("vivek")

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

References

You can find a couple of relevant detailed discussions in:

Simple program to access Facebook elements using Selenium Python but getting errors

4 Answers4

References