selenium selenium-webdriver xpath webdriverwait expected-condition

Selenium: 'function' object has no attribute 'click'

I am running into this issue when trying to click a button using selenium. The button html reads as below:

<button class="Component-button-0-2-65 Component-button-d1-0-2-68">and 5 more</button>

My code is here:

button = EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH,'.//button[contains(@class,"Component-button-d")]'))
    if button:
        print("TRUE")
        button.click()

My output is:

TRUE
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 47, in <module>
    button.click()
AttributeError: 'function' object has no attribute 'click'

I am stumped as to why 'button' element is found by selenium (print(True) statement is executed) but then the click() method returns an attribute error.

This is the page I am scraping data from: https://religiondatabase.org/browse/regions I am able to extract all the information I need on the page, so the code leading up to the click is working.

I was expecting the item to be clickable. I'm not sure how to troubleshoot the attribute error (function object has no attribute click). Because it I paste the xpath into the webpage, it highlights the correct element.

Solution

The element search is always done through the driver object which is the WebDriver instance in it's core form:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "element_xpath")

But when you apply WebDriverWait, the wait configurations are applied on the driver object.

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "element_xpath")))

So even during WebDriverWait the driver object needs to be present along with the expected_conditions and the locator strategy.

This usecase

This line of code:

button = EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH,'.//button[contains(@class,"Component-button-d")]'))

button object references to a junk value but on probing returns true and prints TRUE but the click can't be performed as button is not of WebElement type.

Solution

Given the HTML:

<button class="Component-button-0-2-65 Component-button-d1-0-2-68">and 5 more</button>

To click on the element you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following locator strategies:

Using XPATH with classname:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "//button[contains(@class,'Component-button-d')]"))).click()

Using XPATH with classname and innerText:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//button[contains(@class,'Component-button-d') and text()='and 5 more']"))).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