Clicking a button by class name using selenium with python

Question

Probably a silly question, but I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure this out. I am building a scrapper bot using selenium in python, and I am just trying to click a button on a web page. The web page opens and resizes...

def initalize_browser():
driver.get("**website name**")
driver.maximize_window()

but I cannot get it to click a specific button. This is the buttons HTML code:

<button class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref" onclick="window.location ='/medical'" onkeypress="window.location='/medical'">
                            Medical and Hospital Costs
                        </button>

And this is my code:

 click_button=driver.find_element(by=By.CLASS_NAME, value="mx-auto green-btn btnHref")

 click_button.click()

This is the error I get for this code:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"css selector","selector":".mx-auto green-btn btnHref"}

I have tried out so many variations of this, including:

 driver.find_element_by_xpath('//button[@class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref"]').click()

Where I get this error:

AttributeError: 'WebDriver' object has no attribute 'find_element_by_xpath'

I have also checked to see if there are perhaps any other attributes with the same class name, but there is not. Any help would be super appreciated, thank you!

Finding by class does not work if you pass more than one class like this. You should use xpath or css. What does your find_element_by_xpath call return? — maciek97x
– maciek97x, Commented Nov 6, 2022 at 10:23
The option with XPATH should work. To answer that, we need to see the error. But it's also possible that there are some iframes on the page. Could you share the page's source code or just check if there is any <iframe> tag inside it? — Eugeny Okulik
– Eugeny Okulik, Commented Nov 6, 2022 at 10:28
@theNishant Hello! So I ran print(driver.page_source) and the error I am getting is that "selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"css selector","selector":".mx-auto green-btn btnHref"}". Any advice on what I can try? — imherebcsomethingisntworking
– imherebcsomethingisntworking, Commented Nov 20, 2022 at 2:25
@maciek97x Hey! I get this return when I run find_element_by_xpath..."AttributeError: 'WebDriver' object has no attribute 'find_element_by_xpath'". — imherebcsomethingisntworking
– imherebcsomethingisntworking, Commented Nov 20, 2022 at 2:26

Eugeny Okulik · Accepted Answer · 2022-11-20 06:53:24Z

7

The method find_element_by_xpath is deprecated now. Use this line:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//button[@class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref"]').click()

instead of:

driver.find_element_by_xpath('//button[@class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref"]').click()

And be sure you have this in imports:

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

The locator click_button=driver.find_element(by=By.CLASS_NAME, value="mx-auto green-btn btnHref") doesn't work because By.CLASS_NAME needs only one class name to find an element, but you gave it 3 class names. The html attribute class consists of a list of elements divided by space. So, in this html code

<button class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref" onclick="window.location ='/medical'" onkeypress="window.location='/medical'">
                            Medical and Hospital Costs
                        </button>

the attribute class has 3 class names mx-auto, green-btn and btnHref
You can't use all the 3 classes with By.CLASS_NAME but you can use all of them using the By.XPATH

answered Nov 20, 2022 at 6:53

Eugeny Okulik

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imherebcsomethingisntworking Over a year ago

You are seriously the best!!! Thank you so much, super useful knowledge. I appreciate it a lot

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