Selenium check if element exists without exception

Question

I want to just check if an element is there or not within a for loop but it just throws an exception and ends the code. How do I go about this?

Answer 1

Instead of driver.find_element you should use driver.find_elements method here.
Something like this:

if driver.find_elements_by_xpath("/div[@class='class_name']"):
    driver.find_element_by_xpath("/div[@class='class_name']").click()

Or this:

elements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("/div[@class='class_name']")
if elements:
    elements[0].click()

driver.find_elements will return you a list of web elements matching the passed locator. In case such elements found it will return non-empty list interpreted by Python as a Boolean True while if no matches found it will give you an empty list interpreted by Python as a Boolean False