Clicking a button by class name using selenium with python

Question

Probably a silly question, but I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure this out. I am building a scrapper bot using selenium in python, and I am just trying to click a button on a web page. The web page opens and resizes...

def initalize_browser():
driver.get("**website name**")
driver.maximize_window()

but I cannot get it to click a specific button. This is the buttons HTML code:

<button class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref" onclick="window.location ='/medical'" onkeypress="window.location='/medical'">
                            Medical and Hospital Costs
                        </button>

And this is my code:

 click_button=driver.find_element(by=By.CLASS_NAME, value="mx-auto green-btn btnHref")

 click_button.click()

This is the error I get for this code:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"css selector","selector":".mx-auto green-btn btnHref"}

I have tried out so many variations of this, including:

 driver.find_element_by_xpath('//button[@class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref"]').click()

Where I get this error:

AttributeError: 'WebDriver' object has no attribute 'find_element_by_xpath'

I have also checked to see if there are perhaps any other attributes with the same class name, but there is not. Any help would be super appreciated, thank you!

Answer 1

The method find_element_by_xpath is deprecated now. Use this line:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//button[@class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref"]').click()

instead of:

driver.find_element_by_xpath('//button[@class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref"]').click()

And be sure you have this in imports:

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

The locator click_button=driver.find_element(by=By.CLASS_NAME, value="mx-auto green-btn btnHref") doesn't work because By.CLASS_NAME needs only one class name to find an element, but you gave it 3 class names. The html attribute class consists of a list of elements divided by space. So, in this html code

<button class="mx-auto green-btn btnHref" onclick="window.location ='/medical'" onkeypress="window.location='/medical'">
                            Medical and Hospital Costs
                        </button>

the attribute class has 3 class names mx-auto , green-btn and btnHref
You can't use all the 3 classes with By.CLASS_NAME but you can use all of them using the By.XPATH