How to skip if element does not exist in Selenium

Question

I am trying to scrape the restaurant names of a food delivery website, and the xpaths are randomly numerical. Not all the numbers exist, so when it tries a certain number for x, the error appears. This is some of my input:

    restaurantname = ['//li[{}]/a/div[2]/h4'.format(x) for x in range(1, 999)]
    for restaurant in restaurantname[:999]:
        title = driver.find_element_by_xpath(restaurant).text
        print(title)
        print('*'*5)

This is the output in my terminal after I run the python file:

Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: 
{"method":"xpath","selector":"//li[157]/a/div[2]/h4"}

How do I make it simply skip if there is "no such element?"

Try to catch the error with try except block.

Konrad
– Konrad

2019-01-29 23:48:11 +00:00
Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 23:48 — Konrad
– Konrad, Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 23:48

Michael Berk · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-29 23:52:47Z

4

You should surround your find_element_by_xpath() and print statements with a try/except block. This will allow you to handle the error with the keyword pass, which means "do nothing."

Good luck!

answered Jan 29, 2019 at 23:52

Michael Berk

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4 Comments

Mimi Chung Over a year ago

Thank you! I played around with the try/except and it worked!

Moshe Slavin Over a year ago

Hi @MimiChung if you find this answers your question you should except it!

Mimi Chung Over a year ago

@MosheSlavin what do you mean except it

Michael Berk Over a year ago

@MimiChung great to hear!

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