Get element text with a partial string match using Selenium (Python)

I am trying to extract the text from within a <strong> tag that is deeply nested in the HTML content of this webpage: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/imo:9854612

For example:

The strong tag is the only one on the webpage that will contain the string ‘cubic meters’.

My objective is to extract the entire text, i.e., “138124 cubic meters Liquid Gas”. When I try the following, I get an error:

url = "https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/imo:9854612"
driver.get(url)
time.sleep(3)
element = driver.find_element_by_link_text("//strong[contains(text(),'cubic meters')]").text
print(element)

Error:

NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {“method”:”link text”,”selector”:”//strong[contains(text(),’cubic meters’)]”}

What am I doing wrong here?

The following also throws an error:

element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//strong[contains(text(),'cubic')]").text

Answer

Your code works on Firefox(), but not on Chrome().

The page uses lazy loading, so you have to scroll to Summary and then it loads the text with the expected strong.

I used a little slower method – I search all elements with class='lazyload-wrapper, and in the loop scroll to the item and check if there is strong. If there isn’t any strong, then I scroll to the next class='lazyload-wrapper.

from selenium import webdriver
import time

#driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

url = "https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/imo:9854612"
driver.get(url)
time.sleep(3)

from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains

actions = ActionChains(driver)
elements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//span[@class='lazyload-wrapper']")

for number, item in enumerate(elements):
    print('--- item', number, '---')
    #print('--- before ---')
    #print(item.text)

    actions.move_to_element(item).perform()
    time.sleep(0.1)

    #print('--- after ---')
    #print(item.text)

    try:
        strong = item.find_element_by_xpath("//strong[contains(text(), 'cubic')]")
        print(strong.text)
        break
    except Exception as ex:
        #print(ex)
        pass

Result:

--- item 0 ---
--- item 1 ---
--- item 2 ---
173400 cubic meters Liquid Gas

The result shows that I could use elements[2] to skip two elements, but I wasn’t sure if this text will be always in the third element.

---

Before I created my version I tested other versions and here is the full working code:

from selenium import webdriver
import time

#driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

url = "https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/imo:9854612"
driver.get(url)
time.sleep(3)

def test0():
    elements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//strong")
    for item in elements:
        print(item.text)

    print('---')

    item = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//strong[contains(text(), 'cubic')]")
    print(item.text)

def test1a():
    from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains

    actions = ActionChains(driver)
    element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[contains(@class,'MuiTypography-body1')][last()]//div")
    actions.move_to_element(element).build().perform()
    text = element.text
    print(text)

def test1b():
    driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")
    time.sleep(0.5)
    text = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[contains(@class,'MuiTypography-body1')][last()]//strong").text
    print(text)

def test2():
    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
    import re
    soup = BeautifulSoup(driver.page_source, "html.parser")
    soup.find_all(string=re.compile(r"d+ cubic meters"))

def test3():
    from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains

    actions = ActionChains(driver)
    elements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//span[@class='lazyload-wrapper']")

    for number, item in enumerate(elements, 1):
        print('--- number', number, '---')
        #print('--- before ---')
        #print(item.text)

        actions.move_to_element(item).perform()
        time.sleep(0.1)

        #print('--- after ---')
        #print(item.text)

        try:
            strong = item.find_element_by_xpath("//strong[contains(text(), 'cubic')]")
            print(strong.text)
            break
        except Exception as ex:
            #print(ex)
            pass

#test0()
#test1a()
#test1b()
#test2()
test3()