Find and click an item from 'onclick' partial value

Question

Is it possible to click an element through selenium by a partial value of an onclick element?

There are multiple input items on a page, and I only need

Answer 1

You are on the right track!

buttons = driver.find_elements_by_name('booksubmit')
for button in buttons:

Yes, this exactly. You want to iterate through name = booksubmit elements and check the "onclick" attribute of each one. Here's what the rest would look like:

buttons = driver.find_elements_by_name('booksubmit')
for button in buttons:
    onclick_text = button.get_attribute('onclick')
    if onclick_text and re.search('Bedroom Deluxe', onclick_text):
        print "found it!"
        button.click()

BeautifulSoup does not help much in this case, since you still need to use selenium's methods to get ahold of the element to click on.

Answer 2

Either XPath or CssSelector would do. No need to have any looping, but straightforward locators.

driver.find_element_by_xpath(".//input[contains(@onclick, '1 Bedroom Deluxe')]")

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("input[onclick*='1 Bedroom Deluxe']")

Answer 3

A general answer for solving these kinds of problems is using the Selenium IDE. From here, you can manually click buttons on a website and have the Selenium IDE (a Firefox plugin) record your actions. From there you can File > Export Test Case As... and choose whatever coding language you want.

Selenium Downloads page: http://docs.seleniumhq.org/download/

Selenium IDE Firefox plugin version 2.9.0 http://release.seleniumhq.org/selenium-ide/2.9.0/selenium-ide-2.9.0.xpi

EDIT: Sometimes you might actually be finding the correct element, but the webdriver tries to find it before it's there. Try adding this line after you create your webdriver:
In Python:
driver.implicitly_wait(10)

This tells your webdriver to give itself more time to try to find the object. It does not add a 10 second wait, but says keep looking for 10 seconds. If it finds the element before 10 seconds, it will continue on as normal.