How to interact with button based on text using Selenium and Python

Question

I'm trying to click buttons based on their text (using selenium). e.g., for the following HTML tag:

<span class="MuiTab-wrapper jss483">Options</span>

I've tried:

driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'Options')]").click()

However, Selenium can't find any element with the text: "Options".

Any ideas?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 07 '21 at 16:22

You are using find_elements_by_xpath method. It will give you a list of web elements, not a single web element. So you can not apply .click() on the result of

driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'Options')]")

You should use find_element_by_xpath instead so your code will be

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

or clicking on the first result (or any other) from the web elements list returner, as following

driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'Options')]")[0].click()

Also possibly you need to add some delay / wait to let the element be loaded before accessing it.
Or maybe you need to scroll that element into the view.
Or maybe the element is inside an iframe...

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 07 '21 at 16:51

Please check in the dev tools (Google chrome) if we have unique entry in HTML DOM or not.

xpath that you should check :

//*[contains(text(), 'Options')]

or

//span[contains(text(), 'Options')]

Steps to check:

Press F12 in Chrome -> go to element section -> do a CTRL + F -> then paste the xpath and see, if your desired element is getting highlighted with 1/1 matching node.

There are 4 ways to click in Selenium.

Code trial 1 :

time.sleep(5)
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(text(), 'Options')]").click()

Code trial 2 :

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//span[contains(text(), 'Options')]"))).click()

Code trial 3 :

time.sleep(5)
button = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(text(), 'Options')]")
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].click();", button)

Code trial 4 :

time.sleep(5)
button = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(text(), 'Options')]")
ActionChains(driver).move_to_element(button).click().perform()

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.common.action_chains import ActionChains

Also, find_elements returns a list, change that to find_element you should be good to go ahead.

or else use list index to point web element.

elems = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'Options')]")
elems[0].click()

This is not recommended way.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 07 '21 at 17:18

To click on the element with text as Options you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using xpath:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//span[contains(@class, 'MuiTab-wrapper') and contains(., 'Options')]").click()

The desired element is a JavaScript enabled element, so ideally, to click on the element you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using XPATH:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//span[contains(@class, 'MuiTab-wrapper') and contains(., 'Options')]"))).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

How to interact with button based on text using Selenium and Python

3 Answers3