Why is Selenium sometimes unable to send characters within input field without any error message?

Question

I'm using Selenium in python to webscrape. Most of the time when I use:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@placeholder='name']").send_keys("data")

it works but in some occasions it does not, and it has no error message:

Message:
Stacktrace:
Backtrace:
       Ordinal0 [0x00BBD953+2414931]
       Ordinal0 [0x00B4F5E1+1963489]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A3C6B8+837304]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A69500+1021184]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A6979B+1021851]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A96502+1205506]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A844E4+1131748]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A94812+1198098]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A842B6+1131190]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A5E860+976992]
       Ordinal0 [0x00A5F756+980822]
       GetHandleVerifier [0x00E2CC62+2510274]
       GetHandleVerifier [0x00E1F760+2455744]
       GetHandleVerifier [0x00C4EABA+551962]
       GetHandleVerifier [0x00C4D916+547446]
       Ordinal0 [0x00B55F3B+1990459]
       Ordinal0 [0x00B5A898+2009240]
       Ordinal0 [0x00B5A985+2009477]
       Ordinal0 [0x00B63AD1+2046673]
       BaseThreadInitThunk [0x7798FA29+25]
       RtlGetAppContainerNamedObjectPath [0x77BB7A9E+286]
       RtlGetAppContainerNamedObjectPath [0x77BB7A6E+238] ```

are you using WebDriverWait to verify the element gotten is actually gotten before sending keys? — smcrowley, Jul 20 '22 at 16:40
example ```el = WebDriverWait(driver, timeout=3).until(lambda d: d.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@placeholder='name']"))``` then you can do ```el.send_keys("data")``` — smcrowley, Jul 20 '22 at 16:41

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 20 '22 at 21:31

To send a character sequence to an <input> element ideally you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use the following locator strategy:

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

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

The problem still remains unfortunately :( – Gutsik József Jul 21 '22 at 14:28 — Gutsik József, Jul 21 '22 at 14:28

Why is Selenium sometimes unable to send characters within input field without any error message?

1 Answers1