Click button by text using Python and Selenium

Selenium is a tool that provides APIs to automate a web application to aid in its testing. In this article, we discuss the use of Selenium Python API bindings to access the Selenium WebDrivers to click a button by text present in the button. In the following example, we take the help of Chrome. The method used is the find_element_by_link_text() which scrapes the element using the text present. In case there is no such element with the given text attribute, NoSuchElementException is returned.

Installation:

Make sure you have Selenium installed using

pip3 install Selenium

And also download the WebDriver for your web browser :

Chrome : https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads
Firefox : https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases
Safari : https://webkit.org/blog/6900/webdriver-support-in-safari-10/

Once Selenium is installed along with the desired WebDriver, we create a file script.py and using our code editor write the python script below which opens up the geeksforgeeks website using the Selenium WebDriver and clicks the Sign In button using the link text.

Syntax:

driver.find_element_by_link_text("sample text")

Steps by step Approach:

• Import required modules.
• Create webdriver object.
• Assign URL.
• Use maximize_window() method to maximize the browser window. And then wait 10 seconds using sleep() method.
• Use find_element_by_link_text() method to click button by text.

Below is the implementation.

# import module
from selenium import webdriver
import time

# Create the webdriver object. Here the 
# chromedriver is present in the driver 
# folder of the root directory.
driver = webdriver.Chrome(r"./driver/chromedriver")

# get https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/
driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")

# Maximize the window and let code stall 
# for 10s to properly maximise the window.
driver.maximize_window()
time.sleep(10)

# Obtain button by link text and click.
button = driver.find_element_by_link_text("Sign In")
button.click()

Output:

First, the WebDriver opens up the window with geeksforgeeks, maximizes it, and waits for 10 seconds. Then it clicks the Sign In button and opens up the sign-up panel.