Python, Selenium, BS4 - Navigating to the next Page

Question

Part of my HTML looks like below:

<div id="qryNav">
<form method="post" action="OffQryRedirector.jsp" id="form1" name="form1">
    <input type="hidden" name="NextPage" value="7" />
    <input type="submit" name="Action" id="oq-nav-begin" value="&lt;&lt;" />
    <input type="submit" name="Action" id="oq-nav-prv" value="&lt;" />
<span class="oq-nav-btwn">Page 1 of 4</span>
    <input type="submit" name="Action" id="oq-nav-nxt" value="&gt;" />
    <input type="submit" name="Action" id="oq-nav-end" value="&gt;&gt;" />  
</form>
<a href="OffQryForm.jsp" class="qryNav"><span>Start a New Search</span></a> 
<!--<a href="javascript:history.back()" class="qryNav"><span>Modify Your Search</span>    </a>--> 
</div>

I am trying to identify the Number of pages and then move to the next page. My code looks like below -

html = driver.page_source
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
pages =  soup.find_all('span', {'class': 'oq-nav-btwn'})[0].text.encode('ascii',     'ignore').strip().upper()
loc_of = pages.find('OF')
num_pages = int(pages[loc_of+2:].strip())
>>> print num_pages
4
span = soup.find_all('span', {'class': 'oq-nav-btwn'})
elem2 = span[0].find_next_sibling() 
elem2.find_element_by_id("oq-nav-nxt")

Post this i am trying to run a loop for each of the 4 Pages - 1.. 4. However when i use

elem2.find_element_by_id("oq-nav-nxt").click()

I get the standard selenium.common.exceptions.StaleElementReferenceException: Message: u'stale element reference: element is not attached to the page document\\n (Session info: chrome=34.0.1847.131)\\n (Driver info: chromedriver=2.9.248315,platform=Windows NT 6.1 x86_64)'

The element is visible. I dont think that the try.. catch... wait.. is the solution for this.. (I may be wrong here.)

I also tried to do the same with the below code -

span = soup.find_all('span', {'class': 'oq-nav-btwn'})
elem2 = span[0].find_next_sibling()
>>> print elem2
<input id="oq-nav-nxt" name="Action" type="submit" value="&gt;">
<input id="oq-nav-end" name="Action" type="submit" value="&gt;&gt;">
</input></input>

But i am unable to navigate the elem2 value above and then click on the "oq-nav-nxt" button.

Your help on this is appreciated.

Answer 1

You don't need to use BeautifulSoup here. Selenium is pretty powerful in terms of locating elements .

One option is to keep finding the next page link by id until it is not found:

while True:
    try:
        next_button = driver.find_element_by_id('oq-nav-nxt')
    except NoSuchElementException:
        break
    next_button.click()