Web Scraping: How to click a specific href link in selenium python?

Question

I wanted to automate a web page using webdriver(Python) wherein the script will click on the href link directly in order to navigate to other page. Couple of details in the specific tag:

<span class = "xyz", ui-sref ="abc", href= "/letters/letters_number/"> 
"hdf"
<i class = 'icons'>letters</i>
</span>

Answer 1

To click() on a the element with the href attribute you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using CSS_SELECTOR:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "span[href=/letters/letters_number/] i.icons"))).click()
  

• Using XPATH:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//span[@href='/letters/letters_number/']//i[@class='icons']"))).click()
  

• 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