How to Check if Element Exists Using Selenium Python

Automation tools like Selenium allow us to automate web processes and test applications via different languages and browsers. Python is one of many languages it supports and is a very easy language.

Its Python client helps us to connect with browsers through Selenium tools. Web testing is vital to developing web applications, but more than that, it allows us to automate web processes.

We need access to the source code and check for certain elements to automate such processes.

This article shows you how to check if an element exists in Selenium using its Python client and API.

Use find_element() to Check if Element Exists Using Selenium Python

To make use of the Selenium Python client, we need to install its package via this pip command:

pip install selenium

Aside from the Python client, we need to have other tools installed if we are to use them, such as the ChromeDriver. You can download and install it fairly easily.

Now, we can use the Selenium module and its Exception section to check if an element exists. First, we get to use the webdriver module to access the browser agent (Chrome) and use the get() method to access the webpage we want to check its elements.

Afterward, use the find_element() method, and pass the By.TAG_NAME argument and the element you want to find (e.g., h2). The find_element() method uses the By strategy and locator to find elements.

In the code below, we use the By.TAG_NAME strategy to find the element we want. We can also use By.CSS_SELECTOR to find elements.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException

driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="C:\chromedriver.exe")
driver.implicitly_wait(0.5)
driver.get("https://thehackernews.com/")

try:
    element = driver.find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "h2")
    hackHead = element.text
    print("Element exist")
    print(hackHead)
except NoSuchElementException:
    print("Element does not exist")

driver.close()

Output:

DeprecationWarning: executable_path has been deprecated, please pass in a Service object
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="C:\chromedriver.exe")

DevTools listening on ws://127.0.0.1:57551/devtools/browser/dce0d9db-6c42-402e-8770-13999aff0e79
Element exist
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DeprecationWarning: executable_path has been deprecated, please pass in a Service object
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="C:\chromedriver.exe")

To deal with that, we need to install the webdriver-manager module to handle browser interactions using the pip command.

pip install webdriver-manager

Afterward, import the module to your code using the statements below.

from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service

And use the service attribute instead of executable_path, and pass the Service() and ChromeDriverManager() methods to the service attribute.

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()))

Now, the code becomes:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()))
driver.implicitly_wait(0.5)
driver.get("https://thehackernews.com/")

try:
    l = driver.find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "h2")
    s = l.text
    print("Element exist -" + s)
except NoSuchElementException:
    print("Element does not exist")

driver.close()

Output:

[WDM] - Downloading: 100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 6.29M/6.29M [00:03<00:00, 2.13MB/s]

DevTools listening on ws://127.0.0.1:57442/devtools/browser/2856cae0-e665-42c3-a20d-a847d52658c1
Element exist
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Because it’s the first time running, you might see the [WDM] part of the output; otherwise, it’s just the DevTools message and your code output that should be visible. With this, you can easily check if an element exists in Selenium using its Python client.