Better way to handle elements with XPath? Selenium - Python

Question

I am scraping data from a lottery website to store all the past results in a database.

I got a problem that almost all information I want to retrive is at /html/body/div[3]/h2 per page of each date the lottery y drawn, but only one of them is at /html/body/div[2]/h2

To fix it I used the following code.

try:

      text = self.driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '/html/body/div\[3\]/h2').text

except :

       text = self.driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '/html/body/div\[2\]/h2').text

It works but I don't like it. Is there a better way to handle this kind of discrepancies?

Looks fine to me. This is what `try/except` blocks are for - see if one thing works, and if it doesn't, try something else. — MattDMo, Mar 31 '22 at 23:11

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 31 '22 at 23:15

Simply use the <h2> tag and you can use either of the following locator strategies:

Using TAG_NAME:

text = self.driver.find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "h2").text

Using CSS_SELECTOR:

text = self.driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "h2").text

Using XPATH:

text = self.driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//h2").text

Better way to handle elements with XPath? Selenium - Python

1 Answers1