Fixing Selenium AttributeError: ‘WebDriver’ object has no attribute ‘find_element_by_xpath’

Are you tired of encountering the dreaded "AttributeError: 'WebDriver' object has no attribute 'find_element_by_xpath'" error when working with Selenium in Python? Don't worry, you're not alone. This error is a common stumbling block for many Selenium users, especially those who are just starting out with web automation. But fear not, as we will explore how to fix this error and get your Selenium code up and running smoothly.

Selenium is a powerful web testing library that allows you to automate browser actions, such as clicking buttons, filling out forms, and navigating between pages. It's widely used for web scraping, web testing, and other automation tasks. However, when you start working with Selenium, you may encounter the error message "AttributeError: 'WebDriver' object has no attribute 'find_element_by_xpath'" when you try to use the find_element_by_xpath method, which is commonly used to locate elements on a web page using XPath expressions.

The reason behind this error is that find_element_by_xpath is a method provided by the WebElement class in Selenium, not by the WebDriver class. The WebDriver class is the main entry point for interacting with a web browser using Selenium, but it doesn't have the find_element_by_xpath method directly. So, to fix this error, you need to make sure you're calling the find_element_by_xpath method on a WebElement object, not on a WebDriver object.

Fixing AttributeError “find_element_by_xpath”

METHOD 1

Install An Older Selenium Version

Checkout for How to get previous versions of Python Selenium Webdriver

METHOD 2

Update Your Code (And Use the Latest Version of Selenium)

If we decide to upgrade to the latest version of Selenium, it would require us to make changes to the code. However, this may not be too difficult as we can simply use find+replace function a few times to update the code accordingly.

Here is a comparison between the old and new APIs for locating web elements. As we can observe, the new API now uses find_element() method, where we need to specify the element we want to find as the first argument.

Old API	New API
find_element_by_id('id')	find_element(By.ID, 'id')
find_element_by_name('name')	find_element(By.NAME, 'name')
find_element_by_xpath('xpath')	find_element(By.XPATH, 'xpath')
find_element_by_link_text('link_text')	find_element(By.LINK_TEXT, 'link_text')
find_element_by_partial_link_text('partial_link_text')	find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, 'partial_link_text')
find_element_by_tag_name('tag_name')	find_element(By.TAG_NAME, 'tag_name')
find_element_by_class_name('class_name')	find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, 'class_name')
find_element_by_css_selector('css_selector')	find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'css_selector')

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