Message: element not interactable on accessing a tag python

Question

I am trying to access the sign in button on the url as shown in the code below. I have verified the content of the url as well as the href. They are both consistent with what appears using inspect element dev tool.

But on clicking the extracted element I get the error:

Message: element not interactable 

I have no idea why is this occurring.

Kindly help me solve this issue

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

# setup the browser
browser = webdriver.Chrome('./chromedriver')
browser.get('https://libraries.usc.edu/')
browser.maximize_window()

# access the relevant a tag after inspecting it in dev tool inspect element
a_tag_elt = WebDriverWait(browser, 10).until(lambda browser :
                                             browser.find_element_by_css_selector('div.site-header__signin a'))

# sanity check by printing out the details
print(type(a_tag_elt))
print(a_tag_elt.get_attribute('href'), a_tag_elt.get_attribute('innerHTML'))

# produces Message: element not interactable error
a_tag_elt.click()

# quit the browser
browser.quit()

Answer 1

To click on Sign In link Induce WebDriverWait() and element_to_be_clickable() and following css selector.

WebDriverWait(browser,10).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR,"a.main-navigation__navbar>.main-navigation__navbar-text"))).click()

Or following xpath.

WebDriverWait(browser,5).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH,"//span[text()='Sign In']"))).click()

You need to import below libraries.

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

Answer 2

To click on the element with text as Sign In you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using CSS_SELECTOR:

  WebDriverWait(browser, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a.main-navigation__navbar span"))).click()
  

• Using XPATH:

  WebDriverWait(browser, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[@class='main-navigation__navbar ']//span"))).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