Python/Selenium: Not able to find dynamically-generated element (button), Error: “Element could not be found”

Question

I'm trying to post text and hyperlink combinations on multiple Facebook groups for my online business promotion.

The problem with my code is: when I pass a hyperlink and some text to send_keys and try to click a button, my script is not able to locate the button and gives me an error: element could not be found .

When I try to pass text to send_keys without a hyperlink, I don't receive this error.

Code:

import re 
from random import randint 
import os 
import time 
import sys
import csv 
from selenium import webdriver from
selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys from
selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select


driver = webdriver.Firefox() driver.get("https://www.facebook.com/")
driver.find_element_by_id("email").clear()
driver.find_element_by_id("email").send_keys("abc@yahoo.in")
driver.find_element_by_id("pass").clear()
driver.find_element_by_id("pass").send_keys("************")
driver.find_element_by_class_name("uiButton").click() time.sleep(3)

with open('url1', 'r') as f:
    for line in f:
        time.sleep(randint(8,10))
        driver.get(line)
        try:
            driver.find_element_by_class_name("uiTextareaAutogrow").click()
        except:
            pass
        time.sleep(randint(3,6))
        driver.find_element_by_class_name("uiTextareaAutogrow").send_keys("some text and hyderlink http://google.com ")
        time.sleep(randint(10,15))
        driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='u_0_1o']/div/div[5]/div/ul/li[2]/button/").click()

Note: I have URLs of groups collected in a file.

Please advise how this problem can be solved.

Answer 1

Instead of find_element_by_xpath you can try to use WebDriverWait . Syntax is something like this -

WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(expected_conditions.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, '<CSS HERE>'))).click()

This will basically try calling find_element_by_css_selector every half a second until timeout.