Function with the While/Try/Except construction intended to close pop-ups fails

Question

The following piece of Python Selenium code do not work and I would be grateful for helping me to understand why.

It is designed to close pop-ups that block access to the account button. The number of pop-ups may vary. The idea is execute the while loop unless all the pop-ups are closed (the same function is to be called from other lines of the code as well), than the loop should be broken, so the program execution can continue. But it never does.

...
def check_popups(text):
    while True:
        try:
            driver.find_element_by_class_name(text)
        except NoSuchElementException:
            break
        else:
            popup_close_button = driver.find_element_by_class_name("close_m")
            popup_close_button.click()

...
check_popups("alert")

account_button = driver.find_element_by_class_name("lk_reg")
account_button.click()

P. S. Names for all classes are correct, they are not the suspects.

Answer 1

It looks like you are trying to handle an alert. You cannot handle alerts in this way. How to Handle Alert & Pop-up Boxes in Selenium Python for some background for example may be what you intend. Alerts are tricky, and thus far I've avoided having them in our application code for this reason. This SO post may be what you want to be doing Check if any alert exists using selenium with python .

A side note: Oh,and welcome to SO, but mostly welcome to the world of Test Automation. I advise against pop-ups, because they are a user-interface anti-pattern. We should avoid alerts in browser apps, because they break the user focus and interactions are interrupted for a user. We want them only for errors. And to this end, mostly you want your developers to write code that is easy to test. So if the code is hard to test quickly, the developers are possibly not helping themselves.