How to check if element exists in Selenium Python?

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Contents

Selenium Python – Check if element exists

In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if an element with a specific locator exists in the webpage using Selenium in Python.

To check if an element exists in Selenium Python, find the element using a locator like type, id, or any attribute, or using XPath expression, with find_element() method. If the method returns an element, then the element exists, but if the find_element() method throws NoSuchElementException, then we can say that the element does not exist.

In the following code snippet, we use try-except to check if the element exists with the id='my-id-1'.

try:
    element = driver.find_element(By.ID, "my-id-1")
    print("The element exists.")
except NoSuchElementException:
    print("The element does not exist.")

Or if we use an XPath, then the code would be as shown in the following.

try:
    element = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//*[@id='my-id-1']")
    print("The element exists.")
except NoSuchElementException:
    print("The element does not exist.")

Make sure that in the program you import NoSuchElementException from selenium.common.exceptions.

Examples

In the following example, we shall consider loading the HTML file at path https://pythonexamples.org/tmp/selenium/index-11.html . The contents of this HTML file is given below.

index.html

<html>
  <body>
    <h2>Hello User!</h2>
    <div>First div.</div>
    <ul id="my-list-1">
      <li>Apple</li>
      <li>Banana</li>
      <li>Cherry</li>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

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1. Scenario where the element exists

In the following program, we initialize a webdriver, navigate to a specific URL, and check if an element with id="my-list-1" exists in the document or not.

Python Program

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

# Setup chrome driver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=ChromeService(ChromeDriverManager().install()))

# Navigate to the url
driver.get('https://pythonexamples.org/tmp/selenium/index-11.html')

# Get the element
try:
    element = driver.find_element(By.ID, "my-list-1")
    print("The element exists.")
except NoSuchElementException:
    print("The element does not exist.")

# Close the driver
driver.quit()

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Output

2. Scenario where the element does not exist

In this example, we are going to check if there is a paragraph in the document using By.TAGNAME as strategy and "p" as the locator for find_element() method.

Python Program

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

# Setup chrome driver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=ChromeService(ChromeDriverManager().install()))

# Navigate to the url
driver.get('https://pythonexamples.org/tmp/selenium/index-11.html')

# Get the element
try:
    element = driver.find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "p")
    print("The paragraph element exists.")
except NoSuchElementException:
    print("The paragraph element does not exist.")

# Close the driver
driver.quit()

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Output