Selenium findElement(By.CSS_SELECTOR)

Question

I have this button on the page:

<button type="submit" class="sc-pjTqr dzmlqP">Continue</button>`

I checked the documentation and StackOverflow answers and it seems to me that the solution should be:

continue = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR,"button.sc-pjTqr.dzmlqP")

But does not work.

I searched for solutions, but I didn't understand. Why?

Answer 1

The classnames i.e. sc-pjTqr, dzmlqP 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.

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Solution

To identify the element with text as Continue you can use the following locator strategy:

• Using xpath:

  continue = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//button[text()='Continue']")
  

Ideally to identify the clickable element you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use the following locator strategy:

• Using XPATH:

  continue = WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//button[text()='Continue']")))
  

• 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