how to click or select on very first element(value) of input dropdown box in python using selenium webdriver

Question

I am a beginner in python web scraping and trying to automate the site. In the website which I want to scrape there is a searching filter, where I am applying filters on input box dropdown tag.
in the drop-down box, I write the country name and all country come accordingly but I am unable to select or click the very first country that comes as a value in the dropdown box. I applied some code also but my script fails and terminated.
Below is the image for better understanding. enter image description here

I also applied some code, please check below

p_location='united states'

browser.find_by_xpath("//label[contains(.,'Geography')]").first.click()
        actions_wait_time = randint(15, 30)
        time.sleep(actions_wait_time)
        loc_input = browser.find_by_xpath("//input[@placeholder='Add locations']")
        loc_input.type(p_location)
        actions_wait_time = randint(15, 30)
        time.sleep(actions_wait_time)
        loc_input.type(Keys.TAB)
        time.sleep(3)
        loc_input.type(Keys.RETURN)

I want to select the first value from the dropdown list. Please help

Answer 1

It's not possible to come up with the exact code without seeing the DOM of the page, however one thing is obvious: you should not be using time.sleep function as it is a some form of a performance anti-pattern.

You should go for Explicit Wait instead like:

loc_input = WebDriverWait(browser, 10).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//input[@placeholder='Add locations']")))
first_element = WebDriverWait(browser, 10).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//xpath/for/the/first/element/in/the/dropdown")))
first_element.click()

More information: How to use Selenium to test web applications using AJAX technology