Xtykutl

Set-up

I use selenium for a variety of things and found myself defining the same functions over and over again.

I decided to define the functions in a separate file, and import these to my work files.

If I define functions and execute all in one file, things work fine. See the simple full_script.py below,

# import webdriver

from selenium import webdriver



# create browser

browser = webdriver.Firefox(

        executable_path='/mypath/geckodriver')



# define short xpath function

def el_xp(x):

    return browser.find_element_by_xpath(x)      



# navigate to url

browser.get('https://nos.nl')



# obtain title first article

el_xp('/html/body/main/section[1]/div/ul/li[1]/a/div[2]/h3').text

This successfully returns the title of the first article on this news website.

Problem

Now, when I split the script in a xpath_function.py and a run_text.py, and save them in a test folder on my desktop, things don't work fine.

xpath_function.py

# import webdriver

from selenium import webdriver



# create browser

browser = webdriver.Firefox(

        executable_path='/mypath/geckodriver')



# define short xpath function

def el_xp(x):

    return browser.find_element_by_xpath(x)  

run_test.py

import os

os.chdir('/my/Desktop/test')

import xpath_function as xf



# import webdriver

from selenium import webdriver



# create browser

browser = webdriver.Firefox(

        executable_path='/Users/lucaspanjaard/Documents/RentIndicator/geckodriver')



browser.get('https://nos.nl')



xf.el_xp('/html/body/main/section[1]/div/ul/li[1]/a/div[2]/h3').text

Executing run_test.py results in 2 browsers opened, of which one navigates to the news website and the following error,

NoSuchElementException: Unable to locate element: 

/html/body/main/section[1]/div/ul/li[1]/a/div[2]/h3

I suppose the issue is that in both xpath_function.py and run_test.py I'm defining a browser.

However, if I don't define a browser in xpath_function.py, I get an error in that file that no browser is defined.

How do I solve this?

You can easily fix it by changing the definition of el_exp to include the browser as an extra parameter:

def el_xp(browser, x):

    return browser.find_element_by_xpath(x)

now in run_test.py you call it like this:

xf.el_xp(browser, '/html/body/main/section[1]/div/ul/li[1]/a/div[2]/h3').text