Selenium Unable to locate Element (Partial Text Link)

Question

I am new to Selenium and I try to click a link on a second page (after the login page). The login part works and the browser goes to the next page however on the next page it raises an exception:

This is my Traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "d:/Personal_projects/Programmeren/Python/Automate the boring stuff/Chapter12/seleniumTest.py", line 22, in <module>
    weekElem = browser.find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT,'/go/')
  File "C:\Users\****\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python37\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 1246, in find_element
    'value': value})['value']
  File "C:\Users\****\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python37\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 424, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "C:\Users\****\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python37\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\errorhandler.py", line 247, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"partial link text","selector":"/go/"}
  (Session info: chrome=96.0.4664.93)

This is my code (login info obviously blurred):

#! python3

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

import time
browser = webdriver.Chrome()

# First webpage
browser.get('https://www.signupgenius.com/register')
userElem = browser.find_element(By.ID,'email')
userElem.send_keys('************')
passwordElem = browser.find_element(By.ID,'pword')
passwordElem.send_keys('**********')
loginBtnElem = browser.find_element(By.ID,'loginBtnId')
loginBtnElem.click()
time.sleep(10)

# Second  webpage
weekElem = browser.find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT,'/go/')
weekElem.click()

The element that I am looking for is:

<a href="/go/10C426245672F85" class="text-orange text-underlined"><strong class="ng-binding">1212</strong></a>

(the part after /go/ changes every week, that why I use Partial Link Text)

I hope someone could help me out with this one!

EDIT I found the fix, by using Xpath the problem was solved:

weekElem = browser.find_element(By.XPATH, '//a[contains(@href,"/go/")]')

If someone could elaborate WHY partial link text does not work, that would give me more insight in how Selenium works!

Answer 1

The string go isn't part of the LINK_TEXT of the A tag. Instead it's the part of the value of the href attribute. Hence you can't use go as a PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT.

---

Solution

You can use the string go as a part of the value of the href attribute as follows:

• Using starts-with():

  weekElem = browser.find_element(By.XPATH, '//a[starts-with(@href,"/go/")]/strong')
  

• Using contains():

  weekElem = browser.find_element(By.XPATH, '//a[contains(@href,"/go/")]/strong')
  

Answer 2

use the below code and replace "variable" with whatever and "link" with a word in the link.

variable = WebDriverWait(driver,15).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, './/a[contains(@href, "/link/")]/span'))).click()

a[contains(@href, "/jobs/")]/span'

If that doesn't work right click the webpage, click inspect then use the arrow icon to click on the button that they want to interact with after that the right click the source code of the button and hover over copy then click on copy xpath or whatever is needed