Unable to open href link in selenium python

Question

I have a array called accounts which gets all the href's i want, i then want to open each of these, i have tried the following code

        accounts = self.driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//a[contains(@href, '/signin?')]")
        for account in accounts:
            self.driver.get(account)
            time.sleep(3)

But returns

selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidArgumentException: Message: invalid argument: 'url' must be a string
  (Session info: chrome=80.0.3987.132)

You can try to print(account) to see variable account.

jizhihaoSAMA
– jizhihaoSAMA

2020-03-16 08:12:27 +00:00
Commented Mar 16, 2020 at 8:12 — jizhihaoSAMA
– jizhihaoSAMA, Commented Mar 16, 2020 at 8:12

Sameer Arora · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-16 08:23:29Z

1

You are fetching the list of web elements, so you need to first fetch the href attribute from those web elements and then hit them.
You can do it like:

accounts = self.driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//a[contains(@href, '/signin?')]")
for account in accounts:
    self.driver.get(account.get_attribute("href"))
    time.sleep(3)

answered Mar 16, 2020 at 8:23

Sameer Arora

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1 Comment

DMart Over a year ago

Be careful to address relative urls in the hrefs as well.

undetected Selenium · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-16 08:25:14Z

To open the href, instead of the WebElement you need to invoke get() passing the href attribute inducing WebDriverWait for the visibility_of_all_elements_located() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using CSS_SELECTOR:

accounts = [my_elem.get_attribute("href") for my_elem in WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.visibility_of_all_elements_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a[href*='/signin?']")))]
for account in accounts:
    self.driver.get(account)

Using XPATH:

accounts = [my_elem.get_attribute("href") for my_elem in WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.visibility_of_all_elements_located((By.XPATH, "//a[contains(@href, '/signin?')]")))]
for account in accounts:
    self.driver.get(account)

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

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