How to find and click the "Like" button on Facebook page using Selenium

Question

I am trying to automate the process of liking pages on Facebook. I've got a list of each page's link and I want to open and like them one by one. I think the Like button doesn't have any id or name, but it is in a span class.

<span class="x1lliihq x6ikm8r x10wlt62 x1n2onr6 xlyipyv xuxw1ft">Like</span>

I used this code to find and click on the "Like" button.

def likePages(links, driver):
    for link in links:
        driver.get(link)
        time.sleep(3)
        driver.find_element(By.LINK_TEXT, 'Like').click()

And I get the following error when I run the function:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element

Answer 1

You cannot use Link_Text locator as Like is not a hyperlink. Use XPath instead, see below:

XPath : //span[contains(text(),"Like")]

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//span[contains(text(),"Like")]').click()

Answer 2

The classname attribute values like x1lliihq, x6ikm8r, etc, are dynamically generated and is bound to chage sooner/later. They may change next time you access the application afresh or even while next application startup. So can't be used in locators.

Moreover the the element is a <span> tag so you can't use By.LINK_TEXT

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Solution

To click on the element Like you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following locator strategies:

• Using XPATH and text():

  WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//span[text()='Like']"))).click()
  

• Using XPATH and contains():

  WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//*[contains(., 'Like')]"))).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
  

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References

You can find a couple of relevant detailed discussions on NoSuchElementException in:

• selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element while trying to click Next button with selenium
• selenium in python : NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element