Selenium Python click href element no attributes

Question

Hello I need to click on a href link but it doesn't have any class, id, text or anything at all.

<div>
<a href="/ad/repost/id/2109701">
    <span>Réafficher</span>
    <i class="fa fa-refresh">
    </i>
</a>

I've tried the following and multiple other things.

Link = driver.find_element((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="body"]/div[4]/div[3]/div[1]/div[3]/div[1]/a/span'))

But it throws an error.

I also have the same issue with an input button :

<div class="modal-pm-left">
    <input type="button" class="btn-orange modal-close" value="Fermer">
</div>

help >_<

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 18 '22 at 16:40

You can locate the href element with the following locators:

"//a[contains(@href,'/ad/repost/id/2109701')]"

or

"//a[./span[text()='Réafficher']]"

The input element can be located with

"//input[@value='Fermer']"

I can't be 100% sure about uniqueness of the locators above without seeing the actual web page HTML

undetected Selenium · Answer 2 · 2022-01-18T17:30:57.653

The href attribute is part of the parent A tag, which also have a descendant SPAN which contains the text Réafficher. So invoking click on the SPAN would also result as similar as clicking the A tag with the href attribute.

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

Using css_selector:

driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a[href$='2109701'] span").click()

Using xpath:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//a[@href]//span[text()='Réafficher']").click()

Ideally to click on a 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[href$='2109701'] span"))).click()

Using XPATH:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[@href]//span[text()='Réafficher']"))).click()

Similarly, to click on the <input> button 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.btn-orange.modal-close[value='Fermer']"))).click()

Using XPATH:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//input[@class='btn-orange modal-close' and @value='Fermer']"))).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

Selenium Python click href element no attributes

2 Answers2