Python Selenium find element which contains specific text

Question

I have a problem. I want to find the login page of several websites using Selenium. To do this, I try to go to the page and click the button with text such as "sign in", "login", and so on. This worked for Netflix. Example:

Code Website: Netflix.com

<a href="/login" class="authLinks redButton" data-uia="header-login-link">Sign In</a>

My Code to detect the button:


result = "https://www.microsoft.com"

driver.get(result)

elem = driver.find_element_by_link_text('Sign In').click

print(driver.current_url) # returns the website: https://www.netflix.com/de-en/login

Now I try this with the website Microsoft.com. Website code as image:

If I now change my contains query to:

driver.find_element_by_link_text('Sign in').click # small "in"

Selenium does not find any element. I have tried many different options that Selenium offers such as:

find_element_by_id
find_element_by_name
find_element_by_link_text
...

eg: [https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/locating-elements.html]

My goal is to use the textual information like "sign in, login" etc. to find the button and press it.

I would be very grateful for your help

cruisepandey · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-12 03:04:14Z

See the issue here is with Netflix.com , you have a HTML like this :

<a href="/login" class="authLinks redButton" data-uia="header-login-link">Sign In</a>

see the tag, it is a, which is an anchor tag in HTML.

find_element_by_link_text, or find_element_by_partial_link_text look for text between anchor tag.

But when you go to Microsoft.com

<div class="mectrl_header_text mectrl_truncate">Sign in</div>

Sign in is wrapped inside div. so find_element_by_link_text or find_element_by_partial_link_text will not work.

instead you can try with below xpath :-

//div[text()='Sign in']

in code :-

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[text()='Sign in']").click()

or you can give it a try with Explicit waits as well :-

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//div[text()='Sign in']"))).click()

Prophet · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-12 09:02:22Z

0

As described by cruisepandey for these two particular cases, find_element_by_link_text will work in some cases but in some other cases will not.
While locating element by it's text will work for all these case.
So I never use find_element_by_link_text or by partial text methods, just using find_element_by_xpath method based on element's text and it works fine.
In your case you can use

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

This will be more simple, stable and reliable.

answered Aug 12, 2021 at 9:02

Prophet

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