Finding elements by CSS selector with ChromeDriver (Selenium) in Python

Question

I'm using ChromeDriver of Selenium with Python and I'm trying to find a button on my page that has the following HTML:

<input id="j_id0:SiteTemplate:j_id255:new" type="submit" name="j_id0:SiteTemplate:j_id255:new" value="New" class="kbutton-white">

The only thing I know being constant is the id and name ending with "new" and I'm trying to use the following code to identify and click that element:

test_runner.driver.find_element_by_css_selector('[id*=new]').click()

However, I get this error when I run the code:

raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"css selector","selector":"[id*=new]"}

What's my mistake here?

Update: This element was inside an iframe and I had to switch to the iframe before trying to find the element. Please see comments for the answer.

Answer 1

As per the HTML you have shared to invoke click() on the desired element you can use the following css_selector :

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("input.kbutton-white[id$='new'][name$='new'][value='New']").click()

Explaination :

• .kbutton-white : The class attribute.
• id$='new' : id attribute ends with new
• name$='new' : name attribute ends with new
• value='New' : The value attribute.

But it seems the element is dynamic so you may need to induce WebDriverWait as follows :

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input.kbutton-white[id$='new'][name$='new'][value='New']"))).click()

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References

You can find a couple of relevant detailed discussions in:

• Java Selenium webdriver expression finding dynamic element by ccs that starts with and ends with
• How to click a dynamic link with in a drupal 8 website using xpath/css selector while automating through Selenium and Python
• How to get selectors with dynamic part inside using Selenium with Python?