How to locate Instagram Follow button with selenium (Python)

Question

I’m trying to locate the ‘follow’ button element on an instagram page (using selenium).

I’ve found the main ‘follow’ button of a user’s page (https://www.instagram.com/USERNAME/) with the following code:

follow_button = self.driver.find_element_by_css_selector('button')

Although after clicking the above element ^, now I’m trying to locate ‘follow’ buttons visible when you view a user’s followers.
Click here to see which buttons I’m referring to.

I’ve tried the following code but it doesn’t work:

acc_follow_buttons = self.driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('button')

for acc in acc_follow_buttons[:15]:
    acc.click() 
    time.sleep(1)

I’ve also tried searching with Xpath, with no luck.

Could anyone with experience in Selenium help me with the code to locate the follow buttons on this page.

Asked By: Luke

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Source

Answer 1

I don’t have an Instagram account so I’m answering somewhat blind, but do the follow buttons have classes? If so then you can use driver.find_elements_by_class_name() to find the specific buttons.

Answered By: nbbbrewer

Answer 2

try this. range here points to number of followers.add a code to get follower count and append it to range.note that, list starts from 1.

for i in range(1, 10):
                follow = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/div[3]/div/div[2]/ul/div/li[{}]/div/div[3]/button'.format(i))
                follow.click()
                time.sleep(0.5)

Answered By: Prem Ib

Answer 3

You have to search for the button by button text:

Follow_Button = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[text()='Follow']")

Answered By: Tommaso Montagni

Answer 4

Without having to check if a element exist or not, check if the ds_user_id cookie is in the cookies.

# make a function to check if instagram is logged in
def is_logged_in():

  # getting instagram so we only have instagram cookies in driver.get_cookies()
  driver.get("https://www.instagram.com")

  # get all the cookies, this returns a list of dicts
  cookies = driver.get_cookies()

  # loop through all the cookies till we find some cookie has ds_user_id in its name
  # to return True, but if the loop finished without finding one it will return False
  for cookie in cookies:
    if cookie['name'] == 'ds_user_id':
      return True
  return False

Very fast and better way.

Answered By: Kh4lid MD

How to locate Instagram Follow button with selenium (Python)

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