Issue using XPath

Question

I'm using Selenium and PyCharm.

Website: https://www.expedia.com/

I'm trying to click() on the Search button. I used these:

driver.find_element(By.ID, "search-button-hp-package").click()

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='search-button-hp-package']").click()

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[@id='search-button-hp-package']").click()

I'm getting the following error:

selenium.common.exceptions.ElementNotInteractableException: Message: element not intractable

Can someone explain me why the element with the id='search-button-hp-package' isn't intractable?

What I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Looks like you are looking for the wrong element.

In the web page that loads with the link: https://www.expedia.com/ I tried to look find the element with the xpaths or even the ID mentioned by you in your description,

driver.find_element(By.ID, "search-button-hp-package").click()
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='search-button-hp-package']").click()
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[@id='search-button-hp-package']").click()

This didn't return any result.

I then tried to find the element with xpath: //button[@data-testid='submit-button']

With this I was able to locate the Search button. Here is the reference HTML from browser console,

After I was able to locate the element I was also able to click it using Java + Selenium with this line of code:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//button[@data-testid='submit-button']")).click();

You can use it in Python like,

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[@data-testid='submit-button']").click()

If I'm missing something, or it's a different element that you want to click, do let me know and I'll try to help with what I can.

Answer 2

Sometimes websites don't do what you might expect with the elements.

In this case you would expect the button element to be the thing you actually click. But instead it looks to me like the label, which is the parent element, is the element you want to click.

In short, the button is in fact not intractable. So try the some of the surrounding elements instead, parent in this case:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='search-button-hp-package']/..").click()

css selector alternative:

driver.find_element_by_css_selector(".package-form-fields label.search-btn-col").click()

When this happens, you can narrow down what you need to click by looking at what portion of the element you're trying to click is highlighted in dev tools when you look at the surrounding elements.

Answer 3

Try this in the console if it is working use it of the website $x("//*[@id='search-button-hp-package']/span")

Answer 4

The error you are getting is because there would another element overlapping the element you want to click on. Please look at the dom of the website and find out what that element is. Please debug the script you are writing and make sure there no pop ups or any other kind of objects overlapping the element