Getting a number from pubchem site with Selenium

Question

I'm doing a search on the pubchem site with the code below. I need to get the "Compound CID:" number from the screen from the search result but I couldn't get it. I need help on this.

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
url = "https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/"
driver.get(url)
driver.maximize_window()
searchInput = driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/div[1]/div/div/main/div[1]/div/div[2]/div/div[2]/form/div/div[1]/input")
searchInput.click()
searchInput.send_keys("75-05-8")
searchInput.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)
time.sleep(2)
driver.close()

Answer 1

To print the text 6342 you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using css_selector and get_attribute("innerHTML"):

  print(driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a[data-label^='Featured Compound Result Secondary Link; Position:1; Page:1'] > span.breakword > span").get_attribute("innerHTML"))
  

• Using xpath and text attribute:

  print(driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//a[starts-with(@data-label, 'Featured Compound Result Secondary Link; Position:1; Page:1')]/span[@class='breakword']/span").text)
  

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Ideally you need to induce WebDriverWait for the visibility_of_element_located() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using CSS_SELECTOR and text attribute:

  driver.get("https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/")
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input[type='text'][id^='search']"))).send_keys("75-05-8" + Keys.RETURN)
  print(WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a[data-label^='Featured Compound Result Secondary Link; Position:1; Page:1'] > span.breakword > span"))).text)
  

• Using XPATH and get_attribute("innerHTML"):

  driver.get("https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/")
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//input[@type='text'][starts-with(@id, 'search')]"))).send_keys("75-05-8" + Keys.RETURN)
  print(WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//a[starts-with(@data-label, 'Featured Compound Result Secondary Link; Position:1; Page:1')]/span[@class='breakword']/span"))).text)
  

• Note : You have to add the following imports :

  from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
  from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
  from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
  

• Console Output:

  6342
  

You can find a relevant discussion in How to retrieve the text of a WebElement using Selenium - Python

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References

Link to useful documentation:

• get_attribute() method Gets the given attribute or property of the element.
• text attribute returns The text of the element.
• Difference between text and innerHTML using Selenium