How to fix this issue element not interactable Selenium Python

Question

I have the following line in my script code, where the XPath I got it from Selenium IDE that works fine:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("(//a[contains(@href, '')])[20]").click()

An automation test stops here with this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "Script.py", line 65, in <module>
    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//a[contains(@href, '')])[20]").click()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.py", line 80, in click
    self._execute(Command.CLICK_ELEMENT)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.py", line 633, in _execute
    return self._parent.execute(command, params)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 321, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 242, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.ElementNotVisibleException: Message: element not interactable
(Session info: chrome=74.0.3729.131)
(Driver info: chromedriver=74.0.3729.6 (255758eccf3d244491b8a1317aa76e1ce10d57e9-refs/branch-heads/3729@{#29}),platform=Windows NT 6.1.7601 SP1 x86_64)

How to fix this issue?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Seeing as you just want to scrape the data, I recommend you use this solution:

element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("(//a[contains(@href, '')])[20]")
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].click();", element)

Which clicks the element via Javascript as opposed to a "natural" click that selenium uses (to try to simulate the user experience).

I answered a similar question here that links to another post on it as well.

Answer 2

I would like to share my experience on that in case someone else had same scenario.
I received same error message "Message: element not interactable".
And after like two hours of troubleshooting it turned out that there was another hidden element identified by XPATH. So, I modified my XPATH to ensure capturing targeted element only.

Answer 3

Sometimes you may need to copy Full XPATH. That was one work around I found.

Answer 4

I was able to fix this issue with using full Xpath instead of x path for anyone coming here in the future I hope this will help. I think the reason for this is the element I wanted to click was wrapped by another element so it was not interactable