'WebDriver' object has no attribute 'find_element_by_link_text' – Selenium script suddenly stopped working
Question:
This is a weird issue I have ran into and I can’t find any solution for this across the internet. I was using selenium in google colab to scrape a website and my code was working completely fine. I woke up the next day and ran the code again without changing a single line and don’t know how/why my code starting giving me this error, AttributeError: ‘WebDriver’ object has no attribute ‘find_element_by_link_text’. Same for find_element_by_class_name and id etc. I then rechecked a previously working script just to confirm and that gave me the same error too. I am confused about what happened suddenly and the scripts started giving me these errors.
How do I solve this? What am I doing wrong here?
!pip install selenium
!apt-get update
!apt install chromium-chromedriver
from selenium import webdriver
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
driver = webdriver.Chrome('chromedriver',options=chrome_options)
driver.get("https://petrowiki.spe.org/PetroWiki")
driver.title #this line is returning the correct title value, code is able to access the url
peh = driver.find_element_by_link_text('Pet. Eng. Handbook')
peh.click()
Answers:
Selenium just removed that method in version 4.3.0. See the CHANGES: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/a4995e2c096239b42c373f26498a6c9bb4f2b3e7/py/CHANGES
Selenium 4.3.0
* Deprecated find_element_by_* and find_elements_by_* are now removed (#10712)
* Deprecated Opera support has been removed (#10630)
* Fully upgraded from python 2x to 3.7 syntax and features (#10647)
* Added a devtools version fallback mechanism to look for an older version when mismatch occurs (#10749)
* Better support for co-operative multi inheritance by utilising super() throughout
* Improved type hints throughout
You now need to use:
driver.find_element("link text", "Pet. Eng. Handbook")
For improved reliability, you should consider using WebDriverWait in combination with element_to_be_clickable.
File "/goinfre/mabbas/.brew/lib/python3.11/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 830, in find_element
return self.execute(Command.FIND_ELEMENT, {"using": by, "value": value})["value"]
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/goinfre/mabbas/.brew/lib/python3.11/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 440, in execute
self.error_handler.check_response(response)
File "/goinfre/mabbas/.brew/lib/python3.11/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 245, in check_response
raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidArgumentException: Message: invalid argument: invalid locator
Can anyone tell me why would that be . I changed it accordingly to this
driver.find_element("link text", "Pet. Eng. Handbook")
This is a weird issue I have ran into and I can’t find any solution for this across the internet. I was using selenium in google colab to scrape a website and my code was working completely fine. I woke up the next day and ran the code again without changing a single line and don’t know how/why my code starting giving me this error, AttributeError: ‘WebDriver’ object has no attribute ‘find_element_by_link_text’. Same for find_element_by_class_name and id etc. I then rechecked a previously working script just to confirm and that gave me the same error too. I am confused about what happened suddenly and the scripts started giving me these errors.
How do I solve this? What am I doing wrong here?
!pip install selenium
!apt-get update
!apt install chromium-chromedriver
from selenium import webdriver
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
driver = webdriver.Chrome('chromedriver',options=chrome_options)
driver.get("https://petrowiki.spe.org/PetroWiki")
driver.title #this line is returning the correct title value, code is able to access the url
peh = driver.find_element_by_link_text('Pet. Eng. Handbook')
peh.click()
Selenium just removed that method in version 4.3.0. See the CHANGES: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/a4995e2c096239b42c373f26498a6c9bb4f2b3e7/py/CHANGES
Selenium 4.3.0
* Deprecated find_element_by_* and find_elements_by_* are now removed (#10712)
* Deprecated Opera support has been removed (#10630)
* Fully upgraded from python 2x to 3.7 syntax and features (#10647)
* Added a devtools version fallback mechanism to look for an older version when mismatch occurs (#10749)
* Better support for co-operative multi inheritance by utilising super() throughout
* Improved type hints throughout
You now need to use:
driver.find_element("link text", "Pet. Eng. Handbook")
For improved reliability, you should consider using WebDriverWait in combination with element_to_be_clickable.
File "/goinfre/mabbas/.brew/lib/python3.11/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 830, in find_element
return self.execute(Command.FIND_ELEMENT, {"using": by, "value": value})["value"]
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/goinfre/mabbas/.brew/lib/python3.11/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 440, in execute
self.error_handler.check_response(response)
File "/goinfre/mabbas/.brew/lib/python3.11/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 245, in check_response
raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidArgumentException: Message: invalid argument: invalid locator
Can anyone tell me why would that be . I changed it accordingly to this
driver.find_element("link text", "Pet. Eng. Handbook")