selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: Unable to locate element:

Question

I'm trying to automatically generate lots of users on the webpage kahoot.it using selenium to make them appear in front of the class, however, I get this error message when trying to access the inputSession item (where you write the gameID to enter the game)

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.kahoot.it")

gameID = driver.find_element_by_id("inputSession")
username = driver.find_element_by_id("username")

gameID.send_keys("53384")

This is the error:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: Unable to locate element:
{"method":"id","selector":"inputSession"}

Answer 1

Looks like it takes time to load the webpage, and hence the detection of webelement wasn't happening. You can either use @shri's code above or just add these two statements just below the code driver = webdriver.Firefox():

driver.maximize_window() # For maximizing window
driver.implicitly_wait(20) # gives an implicit wait for 20 seconds

Answer 2

Could be a race condition where the find element is executing before it is present on the page. Take a look at the wait timeout documentation. Here is an example from the docs

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

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://somedomain/url_that_delays_loading")
try:
    element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
        EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "myDynamicElement"))
    )
finally:
    driver.quit()