The element to be clicked based ONLY on the text it contains (others):
<a class="blah" href="/some_page/"><span>15</span> others</a>
The item that fails:
driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//*[contains(text(), ' others')]").click()
The error:
NoSuchElementException: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//*[contains(text(), 'others')]"}
To locate the clickable 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, "a.blah[href='/some_page/'] > span"))).click()
Using XPATH:
WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[@class='blah' and @href='/some_page/'][contains(., 'others')]"))).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
You can find a couple of relevant discussions on NoSuchElementException in:
An additional alternative from DebanjanB's answer using a different xpath inspired from XPath contains(text(),'some string') doesn't work when used with node with more than one Text subnode
"//*[text()[contains(.,' others')]]"
