Decoding Class names on facebook through Selenium

Question

I noticed that facebook has some weird class names that look computer generated. What I don\'t know is if these classes are at least constant over time or they change in som

Answer 1

You were pretty correct. Facebook is built through ReactJS which is pretty much evident from the presence of the following keywords and tags within the HTML DOM:

• {"react_render":true,"reflow":true}
• <!-- react-mount-point-unstable -->
• ["React-prod"]
• ["ReactDOM-prod"]
• ReactComposerTaggerType:{r:["t5r69"],be:1}

So, the dynamically generated class names are bound to change after certain timegaps.

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Solution

The solution would be to use the static attributes to construct a dynamic Locator Strategy.

To retrieve the first line of the address just below the text FIND US you need to induce WebDriverWait in conjunction with expected_conditions as visibility_of_element_located() and you can use the following optimized solution:

print(WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//span[normalize-space()='FIND US']//following::span[2]"))))

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References

You can find some relevant discussions in:

• Logging Facebook using selenium
• Why Selenium driver fail to recognize ID element of Facebook login page?

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Outro

Note: Scrapping Facebook violates their Terms of Service of section 3.2.3 and you are liable to be questioned and may even land up in Facebook Jail. Use Facebook Graph API instead.