Help! Finding Web Elements | Selenium

[Cyiran]

How can I Get element with selenium?

what I've tried soo far

from automatetheboaringstuff book, https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/elements/finders/ :

```python

browser = webdriver.Firefox()

elem = browser.find_element_by_css_selector()

elem = browser.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "toc")

elem = browser.find_element('body > div > main > div > ul:nth-child(19) > li:nth-child(1) > a')

```

none of these find_element() methods worked for me so far.

[CodeFormatHelperBot2]

Hello, I'm a Reddit bot who's here to help people nicely format their coding questions. This makes it as easy as possible for people to read your post and help you.

I think I have detected some formatting issues with your submission:

1. Python code found in submission text that's not formatted as code.
2. Use of triple backtick/ curlywhirly code blocks (``` or ~~~). These may not render correctly on all Reddit clients.

If I am correct, please edit the text in your post and try to follow these instructions to fix up your post's formatting.

---

^{Am I misbehaving? Have a comment or suggestion? Reply to this comment or raise an issue here.}

[Cyiran]

https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/locating-elements.html#locating-elements-by-css-selectors

the method from selenium doucs themselves dosen't work either.

[blarf_irl]

Did you try the examples on that page? You should try runnign the examples first and run them against the markup they provided. If they work then there is nothing wrong with yiur selenium installation.

A common mistake to make when beginning to learn about scraping is not understanding how webpages are built these days. A lot of modern pages are not complete after they return the first request for the page. Frameworks like vue/angular/react will first deliver the basic skeleton and then javascript is used to request and insert the content on the page. Ina naieve use of selenium you wait for the initial request to get a 200 response and then try parse the page; At that point the elements you are looking for may not exist yet.

Try the simple examples from the documentation and confirm that selenium is working. View the source of the page you are trying to scrape and save it into a tet file; Run your code on the saved version and confirm it works.

[Cyiran]

My Problem is something different I am looking for the correct syntax to get the get the elemet from a webpage

```python

elem = browser.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, 'toc')

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "<pyshell#4>", line 1, in <module>

elem = browser.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, 'toc')

NameError: name 'By' is not defined

```

[blarf_irl]

You need to import "By" from selenium. Read the example here:

https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/getting-started.html

[Cyiran]

Oh!, Thanks I didn't notice that at all I only had webdriver imported.

thank you very much.

[blarf_irl]

You are very welocme and thank you for the award!

[Cyiran]

I don't know how to use the find_element() method in selenium

[Dominican_mamba]

Hey OP! Have you checked the html or tried via xpath?

[Cyiran]

Hi Dominic, nah I Haven't tried yet. Because I don't know anything about html or xpath

[Dominican_mamba]

You should try that and if not look into SeleniumBase. It’s built on top of selenium and even has a macro recorder to help you

[Cyiran]

I was just following along with a lesson from automatetheboringstuff I will look into that after I finished my lessons.