Unable to locate element using selenium chrome webdriver in python selenium

Question

I am new to python and trying to do some webscraping but have some real issues. May be you can help me out.

HTML:

<input autocomplete="off" type="search" name="search-search-field" placeholder="150k companies worldwide" data-cy-id="search-search-field" class="sc-dnqmqq grpFhe" value="">

The first part of my code looks as follows and works good without having any issues:

driver.get("https:")
login = driver.find_element_by_xpath(email_xpath).send_keys(email)
login = driver.find_element_by_xpath(pwd_xpath).send_keys(pwd)
login = driver.find_element_by_xpath(continue_xpath)
login.click()
time.sleep(10)

email and pwd are variables including my login details. As I said that part works pretty fine.

The issues I have are with the following code line:

search = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/div[1]/div/div[1]/header/div/nav/div[1]/div/div/fieldset/input')

As a result I get this following error:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"/html/body/div[1]/div/div[1]/header/div/nav/div[1]/div/div/fieldset/input"}
 

I tried and tried but could not solve the problem. I would appreciate it very much, if anyone could help me out. Thank you!

Answer 1

To locate the search field you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using css_selector:

  search = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("input[name='search-search-field'][data-cy-id='search-search-field']")
  

• Using xpath:

  search = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@name='search-search-field' and @data-cy-id='search-search-field']")
  

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Ideally, to locate the element you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using CSS_SELECTOR:

  search = WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input[name='search-search-field'][data-cy-id='search-search-field']")))
  

• Using XPATH:

  search = WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//input[@name='search-search-field' and @data-cy-id='search-search-field']")))
  

• 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 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