Selenium find_element_by_xpath not working for instagram

Question

I am trying to web scrape Instagram using Python and Selenium. I have had many issues regarding locating the elements but somehow managed to pull through when I tried enough xpaths. But when I try to web scrape Donald Trump's following list (I want this to work for ANY USER'S following list/page), it just doesn't work. Here is the error it's throwing:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//*[@id="f3b066159b38864"]/div/div/a"}

I get the xpaths by right clicking on the element using Google Chrome's inspect feature. If anyone needs me to post the full code I'd be happy to do so.

Answer 1

Try below xpath::

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 20)
element = wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[contains(text(),'laraleatrump')]")))

Note: please add below imports to your solution

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

Working solution:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
driver.get("https://www.instagram.com/realdonaldtrump/")
driver.maximize_window()
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 20)

wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[contains(.,'following')]"))).click()

peoples =  wait.until(
            EC.visibility_of_all_elements_located((By.XPATH, "//div[@role='dialog']//div[contains(@class,'PZuss')]//a")))

        for peoplename in peoples:
            print peoplename.text