Selenium click()

Question

""" Web scraping the wikipidia page """

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()))

driver.get("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page")

num_articles1 = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, '#articlecount a')
print(num_articles1.text)

num_articles1.click()


driver.close()

Question: num_articles1 returns the value but why is the click() not working ? can't understand why is this happening, what am i missing?

Answer 1

On my Windows 10 using latest Selenium, ChromeDriver and Chrome the number of articles i.e. 6,559,615 gets printed perfectly and the click() is also performed perfecto.

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However, to click on the clickable element ideally 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, "#articlecount a"))).click()
  

• Using XPATH:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//div[@id='articlecount']/a"))).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