Selenium WebDriver Unable to Find Element by Id, Using Python

Question

I'm trying to pull up an element that only gets created after the JavaScript runs, but I keep getting the following error message:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: u'Unable to locate element: {"method":"id","selector":"post-count"}' ; Stacktrace: Method FirefoxDriver.prototype.findElementInternal_ threw an error in file:///tmp/tmpittNsw/extensions/[email protected]/components/driver_component.js 

I'm trying to pull this element up on cnn.com. My code:

socket.setdefaulttimeout(30) browser = webdriver.Firefox() # Get local session of firefox browser.get(article_url_txt) # Load page result = browser.find_element_by_id("post-count") 

Answer 1

The element you are looking for is inside an iframe.

The following did the trick for me:

from selenium.webdriver.support.wait import WebDriverWait # ... frame = WebDriverWait(browser, 30).until(lambda x: x.find_element_by_id("dsq1")) browser.switch_to_frame(frame) result = WebDriverWait(browser, 30).until( lambda x: x.find_element_by_id("post-count")) 

Note that I included the use of WebDriverWait(...).until(...) to allow the elements to be created dynamically just in case.

Answer 2

You can tell the WebDriver to wait implicitly until the element is visible.

browser.implicitly_wait(30) result = browser.find_element_by_id("post-count")