Selenium XPath error - Element not found

Question

My Selenium Chromedriver script with Python should login to a website and click on a download button which will download a CSV file. On inspecting, details of download button is:

<button id="csv-button" class="block tiny-margin-top" data-args="csv">
      CSV
</button>

and XPath is:

//*[@id="csv-button"]

but it says XPath element not found when I run the script. Please find the code below:

click_button = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="csv-button"]')
click_button.click()

Answer 1

The reason for Element not found exception could be because there is a timeout issue. The WbeDriver is getting timedout before your page loads completely.  Try using implicit/ explicit wait statements to overcome this problem.
Add this line of code after the last line in the above code:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//*[@id='csv-button']"))).click()

Also remember to import this package:

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

Comments

if timeout is the problem, then its also an option to just a put a sleep in the code...

After opening the page i usualy put minimum a 2 seconds of sleep like this:

Thread.sleep(2000);

my tests often failed with an "element not found" error, and then i applied this simple method and solved my problem...
cheers