How to click on a link while webscraping in python's selenium?

Question

I am using selenium for python. When I am using the xpath to click on a link. I am getting an error TimeoutException: Message:.Ive tried using by.ID and by.tag but it seems like this link is hidden. How can I click these two links.

here my code for the first link:

btn = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH,"/html/body/div[3]/div/div/div[2]/div/div/div/div[2]/div/div/div[1]/div/div/div[2]/div/div/div")))
btn.click()


<div class="lib_33_IXqu lib_10OTPLG lib_rljvxxj lib_2bmVxh4 lib_AWe8PWK lib_NH5Lx3B lib_AWe8PWK"><div class="">Most Active<div class="lib_gdMpTuS lib_3Wb397t lib_QVji0M8 lib_1dwKEN3 lib_2IaUGOQ" aria-hidden="true">Most Active</div></div></div>

<div class="" data-selected="false"><div class="lib_33_IXqu lib_10OTPLG lib_rljvxxj lib_2bmVxh4 lib_AWe8PWK lib_NH5Lx3B lib_AWe8PWK"><div class="">Watchers<div class="lib_gdMpTuS lib_3Wb397t lib_QVji0M8 lib_1dwKEN3 lib_2IaUGOQ" aria-hidden="true">Watchers</div></div></div></div>

Answer 1

This code should work. Additionally, I noticed that there's an overlay that pops up after a few seconds that can interrupt your mouse clicks. I've added a line of code to click out of it too.

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

# location of chromedriver.exe
driver = webdriver.Chrome("D:/chromedriver/94/chromedriver.exe")

driver.get("https://stocktwits.com/rankings/trending")

# waiting for the links to be available
WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//div[@class="lib_33_IXqu lib_10OTPLG lib_rljvxxj lib_2bmVxh4 lib_AWe8PWK lib_NH5Lx3B lib_AWe8PWK"]')))

# capturing the links
links = driver.find_elements(By.XPATH, '//div[@class="lib_33_IXqu lib_10OTPLG lib_rljvxxj lib_2bmVxh4 lib_AWe8PWK lib_NH5Lx3B lib_AWe8PWK"]')

# get rid of the overlay message
WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//button[@class="ub-emb-close"]'))).click()

# looping through the links since they all have the same class
for link in links:
    link.click()
    # do something
    time.sleep(2)

You could also access these links directly by their URLs:

• stocktwits.com/rankings/most-active
• stocktwits.com/rankings/watchers

I see that the overlay pops up a few times after maybe a minute. You could use a function to create a script:

def close_overlay():
    return """
setInterval(()=>{{var overlay = document.querySelector('button[class="ub-emb-close"]');
if(overlay){{overlay.click();}} }}, 5000);
"""

and later, call this in your script somewhere like this:

driver.execute_script(close_overlay())

This little script will check for the close button on that overlay every 5 seconds and closes it.

Note: This script could be trying to click on the close button at the same time your main bot is trying to click. This would lead to an ElementClickInterceptedException . You could handle this exception in your code.

This isn't required though, but something that might come in handy for you later.