The element to be clicked based ONLY on the text it contains (others):

<a  href="/some_page/"><span>15</span> others</a>

The item that fails:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//*[contains(text(), ' others')]").click()

The error:

NoSuchElementException: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//*[contains(text(), 'others')]"}

CodePudding user response：

An additional alternative from DebanjanB's answer using a different xpath inspired from XPath contains(text(),'some string') doesn't work when used with node with more than one Text subnode

"//*[text()[contains(.,' others')]]"

CodePudding user response：

To locate the clickable element 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(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a.blah[href='/some_page/'] > span"))).click()
  

• Using XPATH:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[@class='blah' and @href='/some_page/'][contains(., 'others')]"))).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
  

References

You can find a couple of relevant discussions on NoSuchElementException in:

• selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element while trying to click Next button with selenium
• selenium in python : NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element