Selenium WebDriver - Unable to locate element exception

Question

I am trying to take some scores from websites while using webdriver. I tried so far XPath, CSS, Classname but, sometimes it is located the item, sometimes it does not.

This is the HTML code that I have been trying to take it:

 <td class="score" rowspan="6"><span class="p1_home">0</span> - <span class="p1_away">0</span></td> 

And this is my code (that i tried so far) :

firstHalf[i] = Driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//*[@id=\"parts\"]/tbody/tr[2]/td[2]")).Text;

Other versions :

 firstHalf[i] = Driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("#parts > tbody > tr:nth-child(2) > td.score")).Text;
 firstHalf[i] = Driver.FindElement(By.ClassName("score")).Text;

And also I tried the child classes (under score classes), but the result is same, sometimes can be located the element, sometimes it cannot.

Any suggestion?

Update : To my code, I put some wait or Thread.Sleep still will not work.

for (int r = 0; r < 10; r++)
                {
                    try
                    {
                        string d1 = Driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//span[@class='p1_home']")).Text;
                        string d2 = Driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//span[@class='p1_away']")).Text;
                        //firstHalf[i] = firstHalf[i].Replace(" ", "");
                        firstHalf[i] = d1 + "-" + d2;
                        break;
                    }
                    catch (Exception e)
                    {
                        Thread.Sleep(300);
                        r -= 1;
                        eventCounter++;
                        if (eventCounter == 10)
                        {
                            errorMsg.sendErrMsg(e);
                            //errorMsg.stopProgram();
                        }
                    }
                }

Answer 1

You can use

//span[@class='p1_home']

//span[@class='p1_away']

Answer 2

To locate element of particular class and attribute you can use CSS selector. For example:

Driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector(".score[rowspan='6']")).Text;

In case you having trouble to locate element reliably, you might want get it after certain conditions are met, like so:

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(Driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30));
IWebElement element = wait.Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementIsVisible(By.CssSelector(".score[rowspan='6']")));

Answer 3

Okay, I found a solution with a different approach. Instead of getting two specific class, I used parent class score . Also, I deleted the "for loop" and "try" and "catch" which I am using for finding the object again and again.

To my main loop, I added "try" and "catch" . When I got the exception, I decreased the loop counter, closed the window and opened again. Also, I added some Thread.Sleep in order not to get errors because Web-Driver acts so fast this causes a problem.

Updated Version of my Code:

for (int i = 0;; i < stopLimit.Count; i++)
{
     try
     {
          Thread.Sleep(500);
          string score = Driver.FindElementByCssSelector("#parts > tbody > 
                                                   tr:nth-child(2) > td.score").Text;
          firstHalf[i] = score.Replace(" ", "");
     }
     catch(Exception)  
     {
          i--;
          Thread.Sleep(1500);
          Driver.SwitchTo().Window(Driver.WindowHandles.Last());
          Driver.Close();
          Driver.SwitchTo().Window(Driver.WindowHandles.First());
     }
}