Using a variable in xpath in Python Selenium

Question

I've been having trouble figuring out how to get a variable to work Selenium. This post seems to have helped (Variable not working inside parenthesis) but I still can't get it to work.

When I used the actual value it works. In this case AL-Alabama. I created a variable called state so that I can just call that in my function. I have 13 states to run through.

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//option[@value='AL-Alabama']").click()

This one uses the state variable and in looking at error message it shows the variable value as AL-Alabama. So it seems like it's referencing the correct value in the web page. Not sure what I'm missing or why it's not working. Any guidance would be appreciated.

driver.find_element_by_xpath('//option[@value=' + state + ']').click()
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//option[@value=AL-Alabama]"}

Answer 1

To click() on the element with respect to the variable value attribute of the <option> tag using Selenium and python you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using variable in XPATH:

  state = 'AL-Alabama'
  driver.find_element_by_xpath("//option[@value='" +state+ "']").click()
  

• Using %s in XPATH:

  state = 'AL-Alabama'
  driver.find_element_by_xpath("//option[@value='%s']"% str(state)).click()
  

• Using format() in XPATH:

  state = 'AL-Alabama'
  driver.find_element_by_xpath("//option[@value='{}']".format(str(state))).click()
  

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Best Practices

Ideally. to click() on the element with respect to the variable value attribute of the <option> tag using Selenium] and you need to to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using variable in XPATH:

  state = 'AL-Alabama'
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//option[@value='" +state+ "']"))).click()
  

• Using %s in XPATH:

  state = 'AL-Alabama'
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//option[@value='%s']"% str(state)))).click()
  

• Using format() in XPATH:

  state = 'AL-Alabama'
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//option[@value='{}']".format(str(state))))).click()
  

• Note : You have to add the following imports :

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

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Reference

You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:

• How to find an element with respect to the user input using Selenium and Python?

Answer 2

The single quotes around the value are not present with how you coded it. Try:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//option[@value='" + state + "']").click()