Selenium: How use while loop to click link if it exists? - selenium

Question

I am trying to write a Python program that uses Selenium to click a button to go to the next page if the button is clickable. This is because I am web scraping from varying amounts of pages.
I have tried to use a while loop that checks the href attribute, but the code doesn't click the button, nor does it return an error. If I simply write button.click(), but without a while loop or conditional check for the href attribute, then the program clicks the button correctly.
My code also has a while loop condition of "variable is not None". Is this a valid usage of "is not"? My logic is for the program to click the button to go to the next page if there is an href available from the to click.
Code:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
import time
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
PATH = "C:\Program Files (x86)\chromedriver.exe"
wd = webdriver.Chrome(PATH)
wd.get("https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/search;name=;org=Physics%20and%20Astronomy;title=;phone=;affiliation=Faculty")
time.sleep(1)
button = wd.find_element_by_xpath("""//a[#aria-label='Next page']""")
#<a tabindex="0" aria-label="Next page" class="ng-star-inserted" style=""> Next <span class="show-for-sr">page</span></a>
href_data = button.get_attribute('href')
while (href_data is not None):
time.sleep(0.5)
button.click()
href_data = button.get_attribute('href')
Would anyone here be willing to assist me with this? I understand that Selenium requires the user to download a webdriver, so I apologize for any difficulties with testing my code.
Thank you, ExactPlace441

Answer 1

To loop until all pages were clicked.
wd.get('https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/search;name=;org=Physics%20and%20Astronomy;title=;phone=;affiliation=Faculty')
wait=WebDriverWait(wd, 10)
while True:
try:
wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[#aria-label='Next page']"))).click()
time.sleep(5)
except:
break
Import
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

Answer 2

I faced the same problem then I used gecko driver(selenium Firefox) instead of Chrome. My code was working perfectly in selenium Firefox but same code was not working in selenium Chrome. Without while loop I hadn't any problem to click on button in selenium Chrome browser but it was not working when added while loop. After using gecko driver(selenium Firefox) my problem was solved. Here is an example of while loop that you can use. It will clicking on button until the button disappeared or reach the last page.
i = 1
try:
while i < 2:
button_element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("give your button xpath")
button_element.click() #Our loop will continuing until our button xpath disappeared from web page
except:
pass #when the button xpath will disappeared it will ignore the error and jump to the next section of our code.
Here I modified your code:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException
import time
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.maximize_window()
url = "https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/search;name=;org=Physics%20and%20Astronomy;title=;phone=;affiliation=Faculty"
driver.get(url)
timeout = 20
# This container collect data from first page
containers = WebDriverWait(driver, timeout).until(EC.visibility_of_all_elements_located((By.XPATH,'//div[#class="column ng-star-inserted"]' )))
for container in containers:
name = container.find_element_by_css_selector('.header-details h5') #we are srcaping name from each page
print(name.text)
i = 1
try:
while i < 2: #Now it will look for “next page button” in every page and continuing click on “next page button” until it will reach the last page.
next_page_button = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//li[#class='pagination-next ng-star-inserted']")
next_page_button.click()
#our this container2 start collect data from second page to last page
containers = WebDriverWait(driver, timeout).until(EC.visibility_of_all_elements_located((By.XPATH,'//div[#class="column ng-star-inserted"]' )))
for container in containers:
name = container.find_element_by_css_selector('.header-details h5') #we are srcaping name from each page
print(name.text)
time.sleep(3)
except:
pass #if any page don't have “next page button” then our code will be end without any error.