Checking if element is present using 'By' from Selenium Webdriver and Python

Question

I am attempting to validate that text is present on a page. Validating an element by ID is simple enough, buy trying to do it with text isn't working right. And, I can not locate the correct attribute for By to validate text on a webpage.

Example that works for ID using By attribute

self.assertTrue(self.is_element_present(By.ID, "FOO"))

Example I am trying to use (doesn't work) for text using By attribute

self.assertTrue(self.is_element_present(By.TEXT, "BAR"))

I've tried these as well, with *error (below)

self.assertTrue(self.is_text_present("FOO"))

and

self.assertTrue(self.driver.is_text_present("FOO"))

*error: AttributeError: 'WebDriver' object has no attribute 'is_element_present'

I have the same issue when trying to validate By.Image as well.

Answer 1

From what I have seen, is_element_present is generated by a Firefox extension (Selenium IDE) and looks like:

def is_element_present(self, how, what):
    try: self.driver.find_element(by=how, value=what)
    except NoSuchElementException: return False
    return True

"By" is imported from selenium.webdriver.common:

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException

There are several "By" constants to address each API find_element_by_* so, for example:

 self.assertTrue(self.is_element_present(By.LINK_TEXT, "My link"))

verifies that a link exists and, if it doesn't, avoids an exception raised by selenium, thus allowing a proper unittest behaviour.