There is error “Invalid locator values passed in” in case we use find_element instead of find_element_by

Question

I\'m using Python-Webdriver to automate a \"click\" action. Here is my code:

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium import webdriver
from          


        

Answer 1

According to the documentation, you can use either find_element_by_* shortcuts, or find_element() and find_elements() "private" methods directly:

Apart from the public methods given above, there are two private methods which might be useful with locators in page objects. These are the two private methods: find_element and find_elements.

Example usage:

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//button[text()="Some text"]')
driver.find_elements(By.XPATH, '//button')

But, in your case, instead of passing 2 parameters to find_element(), you are passing a single one - a tuple NEWS_OPTION. You just need to unpack the tuple into positional arguments:

NEWS_OPTION = (By.ID, 'blq-nav-news')
myDynamicElement = driver.find_element(*NEWS_OPTION)

Or, just as an alternative, you could use keyword arguments also:

NEWS_OPTION = {'by': By.ID, 'value': 'blq-nav-news'}
myDynamicElement = driver.find_element(**NEWS_OPTION)

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And, also, whenever you have any doubts how things should work, just dig up the source code and clarify it for yourself. In this case, see how find_element_by_id() method is actually implemented:

def find_element_by_id(self, id_):
    """Finds an element by id.

    :Args:
     - id\_ - The id of the element to be found.

    :Usage:
        driver.find_element_by_id('foo')
    """
    return self.find_element(by=By.ID, value=id_)