Selenium Select not working on dropdown element

Question

So I am trying to run the following code to select an option from a drop-down toolbar:

## Drop-down menu
time.sleep(5) # wait for element to load in page otherwise selenium won't be able to find it
element_dropdown = driver.find_element("id","conference-dropdowns")
element_dropdown.click()

# Select visible text
time.sleep(5)
select = Select(element_dropdown)
select.select_by_visible_text("Bulk Upload")

But then I get the following error:

UnexpectedTagNameException: Message: Select only works on <select> elements, not on <label>

How do I resolve this issue? Why am I getting this error? See structure below. Thanks so much in advance.

What are you trying to achieve? Testing, or you want to scrape the data? If scraping, post the full url. — Barry the Platipus, Jul 21 '22 at 22:19
@platipus_on_fire_333 I'm trying to create a program that will login to a site, navigate through a few toolbars and upload a CSV file after clicking "Bulk Upload". — mexicanRmy, Jul 21 '22 at 22:22
If your end goal is to upload a file, you can achieve this with requests - you can login, then upload that file. — Barry the Platipus, Jul 21 '22 at 22:24
@platipus_on_fire_333 Oh cool! Could you send some resources on how to achieve this? I'm very new to Selenium, requests, etc. — mexicanRmy, Jul 22 '22 at 18:14
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11892729/how-to-log-in-to-a-website-using-pythons-requests-module and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22567306/how-to-upload-file-with-python-requests — Barry the Platipus, Jul 22 '22 at 18:16

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 21 '22 at 22:26

1

The Exception says everything: you can use Select class only with <select> object. Simply try to

click() on button to expand drop-down menu
wait for required option to be clickable
click() on option

answered Jul 21 '22 at 22:26

JaSON

4,843
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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 21 '22 at 22:27

The desired element isn't within any html-select tag, but they are within <label> tag.

So you won't be able to use Select() class.

Solution

The click element with text as Bulk Upload you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use the following locator strategy:

Using XPATH:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//li[@class='dropdown-submenu']//label[@class='submenu' and contains(., 'Bulk Upload')]"))).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 Select not working on dropdown element

2 Answers2

Solution