So I'm trying to print the title of a YouTube video in selenium. I tried it 3 different ways and only one way worked so I just want to know why the other ways didn't work.

My first try:

videoTitle = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("yt-formatted-string.style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer")
print(videoTitle)

This didn't work and this was the error

  File "C:\Users\forre\IdeaProjects\PythonNotes\Packages\Selenium\Web_Scraping.py", line 21, in <module>
    videoTitle = driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/ytd-app/div/ytd-page-manager/ytd-watch-flexy/div[5]/div[1]/div/div[8]/div[2]/ytd-video-primary-info-renderer/div/h1/yt-formatted-string")
  File "C:\Users\forre\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 520, in find_element_by_xpath
    return self.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value=xpath)
  File "C:\Users\forre\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 1244, in find_element
    return self.execute(Command.FIND_ELEMENT, {
  File "C:\Users\forre\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 424, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "C:\Users\forre\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\lib\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":"xpath","selector":"/html/body/ytd-app/div/ytd-page-manager/ytd-watch-flexy/div[5]/div[1]/div/div[8]/div[2]/ytd-video-primary-info-renderer/div/h1/yt-formatted-string"}
  (Session info: chrome=96.0.4664.110)
Stacktrace:
Backtrace:
    Ordinal0 [0x002C6903 2517251]
    Ordinal0 [0x0025F8E1 2095329]
    Ordinal0 [0x00162848 1058888]
    Ordinal0 [0x0018D448 1233992]
    Ordinal0 [0x0018D63B 1234491]
    Ordinal0 [0x001B7812 1406994]
    Ordinal0 [0x001A650A 1336586]
    Ordinal0 [0x001B5BBF 1399743]
    Ordinal0 [0x001A639B 1336219]
    Ordinal0 [0x001827A7 1189799]
    Ordinal0 [0x00183609 1193481]
    GetHandleVerifier [0x00455904 1577972]
    GetHandleVerifier [0x00500B97 2279047]
    GetHandleVerifier [0x00356D09 534521]
    GetHandleVerifier [0x00355DB9 530601]
    Ordinal0 [0x00264FF9 2117625]
    Ordinal0 [0x002698A8 2136232]
    Ordinal0 [0x002699E2 2136546]
    Ordinal0 [0x00273541 2176321]
    BaseThreadInitThunk [0x76136739 25]
    RtlGetFullPathName_UEx [0x77D78AFF 1215]
    RtlGetFullPathName_UEx [0x77D78ACD 1165]
    (No symbol) [0x00000000]


Process finished with exit code 1

My second try:

videoTitle = driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/ytd-app/div/ytd-page-manager/ytd-watch-flexy/div[5]/div[1]/div/div[8]/div[2]/ytd-video-primary-info-renderer/div/h1/yt-formatted-string")
print(videoTitle)

This also didn't work and I got the same error

CodePudding user response：

Your first attempt with

videoTitle = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("yt-formatted-string.style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer")

Has 3 problems:

1. yt-formatted-string.style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer is not a valid CSS Selector for that element. The 2 strings style-scope and ytd-video-primary-info-renderer are the 2 class attribute values. To make the above expression valid you have to put a dot . before each of them since in CSS Selector a dot . before a value indicates that this is a class name.
2. So, yt-formatted-string.style-scope.ytd-video-primary-info-renderer will be a correct CSS Selector, however it will match 3 elements on that page while you want to access the second one.
   You can do this with find_elements_by_css_selector method, accessing the second element from the list.
3. You have to extract the text from the web element
   So, to get the YouTube video title with the first approach your code should be:

videoTitle = driver.find_elements_by_css_selector("yt-formatted-string.style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer")[1].text

As about /html/body/ytd-app/div/ytd-page-manager/ytd-watch-flexy/div[5]/div[1]/div/div[8]/div[2]/ytd-video-primary-info-renderer/div/h1/yt-formatted-string - you are trying to use an absolute XPath expression. This kind of locator is extremely fragile. I tried to use it and couldn't match nothing with this locator.
You should learn how to create correct XPath locators.
For example this will be correct XPath locator here:

"//h1//*[@class='style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer']"

So this will work:

videoTitle = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//h1//*[@class='style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer']").text
print(videoTitle)