Wait until page is loaded with Selenium WebDriver for Python

Question

I want to scrape all the data of a page implemented by a infinite scroll. The following python code works.

for i in range(100):
    driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")
    time.sleep(5)

This means every time I scroll down to the bottom, I need to wait 5 seconds, which is generally enough for the page to finish loading the newly generated contents. But, this may not be time efficient. The page may finish loading the new contents within 5 seconds. How can I detect whether the page finished loading the new contents every time I scroll down? If I can detect this, I can scroll down again to see more contents once I know the page finished loading. This is more time efficient.

Answer 1

The webdriver will wait for a page to load by default via .get() method.

As you may be looking for some specific element as @user227215 said, you should use WebDriverWait to wait for an element located in your page:

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

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get("url")
delay = 3 # seconds
try:
    myElem = WebDriverWait(browser, delay).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, 'IdOfMyElement')))
    print "Page is ready!"
except TimeoutException:
    print "Loading took too much time!"

I have used it for checking alerts. You can use any other type methods to find the locator.

EDIT 1:

I should mention that the webdriver will wait for a page to load by default. It does not wait for loading inside frames or for ajax requests. It means when you use .get('url'), your browser will wait until the page is completely loaded and then go to the next command in the code. But when you are posting an ajax request, webdriver does not wait and it's your responsibility to wait an appropriate amount of time for the page or a part of page to load; so there is a module named expected_conditions.

Answer 2

Trying to pass find_element_by_id to the constructor for presence_of_element_located (as shown in the accepted answer) caused NoSuchElementException to be raised. I had to use the syntax in fragles' comment:

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

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('url')
timeout = 5
try:
    element_present = EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, 'element_id'))
    WebDriverWait(driver, timeout).until(element_present)
except TimeoutException:
    print "Timed out waiting for page to load"

This matches the example in the documentation. Here is a link to the documentation for By.

Answer 3

Find below 3 methods:

readyState

Checking page readyState (not reliable):

def page_has_loaded(self):
    self.log.info("Checking if {} page is loaded.".format(self.driver.current_url))
    page_state = self.driver.execute_script('return document.readyState;')
    return page_state == 'complete'

The wait_for helper function is good, but unfortunately click_through_to_new_page is open to the race condition where we manage to execute the script in the old page, before the browser has started processing the click, and page_has_loaded just returns true straight away.

id

Comparing new page ids with the old one:

def page_has_loaded_id(self):
    self.log.info("Checking if {} page is loaded.".format(self.driver.current_url))
    try:
        new_page = browser.find_element_by_tag_name('html')
        return new_page.id != old_page.id
    except NoSuchElementException:
        return False

It's possible that comparing ids is not as effective as waiting for stale reference exceptions.

staleness_of

Using staleness_of method:

@contextlib.contextmanager
def wait_for_page_load(self, timeout=10):
    self.log.debug("Waiting for page to load at {}.".format(self.driver.current_url))
    old_page = self.find_element_by_tag_name('html')
    yield
    WebDriverWait(self, timeout).until(staleness_of(old_page))

---

For more details, check Harry's blog.

Answer 4

As mentioned in the answer from David Cullen, I've always seen recommendations to use a line like the following one:

element_present = EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, 'element_id'))
WebDriverWait(driver, timeout).until(element_present)

It was difficult for me to find somewhere all the possible locators that can be used with the By, so I thought it would be useful to provide the list here. According to Web Scraping with Python by Ryan Mitchell:

ID

Used in the example; finds elements by their HTML id attribute

CLASS_NAME

Used to find elements by their HTML class attribute. Why is this function CLASS_NAME not simply CLASS? Using the form object.CLASS would create problems for Selenium's Java library, where .class is a reserved method. In order to keep the Selenium syntax consistent between different languages, CLASS_NAME was used instead.

CSS_SELECTOR

Finds elements by their class, id, or tag name, using the #idName, .className, tagName convention.

LINK_TEXT

Finds HTML tags by the text they contain. For example, a link that says "Next" can be selected using (By.LINK_TEXT, "Next").

PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT

Similar to LINK_TEXT, but matches on a partial string.

NAME

Finds HTML tags by their name attribute. This is handy for HTML forms.

TAG_NAME

Finds HTML tags by their tag name.

XPATH

Uses an XPath expression ... to select matching elements.

Answer 5

From selenium/webdriver/support/wait.py

driver = ...
from selenium.webdriver.support.wait import WebDriverWait
element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
    lambda x: x.find_element_by_id("someId"))

Answer 6

On a side note, instead of scrolling down 100 times, you can check if there are no more modifications to the DOM (we are in the case of the bottom of the page being AJAX lazy-loaded)

def scrollDown(driver, value):
    driver.execute_script("window.scrollBy(0,"+str(value)+")")

# Scroll down the page
def scrollDownAllTheWay(driver):
    old_page = driver.page_source
    while True:
        logging.debug("Scrolling loop")
        for i in range(2):
            scrollDown(driver, 500)
            time.sleep(2)
        new_page = driver.page_source
        if new_page != old_page:
            old_page = new_page
        else:
            break
    return True

Answer 7

Have you tried driver.implicitly_wait. It is like a setting for the driver, so you only call it once in the session and it basically tells the driver to wait the given amount of time until each command can be executed.

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.implicitly_wait(10)

So if you set a wait time of 10 seconds it will execute the command as soon as possible, waiting 10 seconds before it gives up. I've used this in similar scroll-down scenarios so I don't see why it wouldn't work in your case. Hope this is helpful.

To be able to fix this answer, I have to add new text. Be sure to use a lower case 'w' in implicitly_wait.

Answer 8

Here I did it using a rather simple form:

from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get("url")
searchTxt=''
while not searchTxt:
    try:    
      searchTxt=browser.find_element_by_name('NAME OF ELEMENT')
      searchTxt.send_keys("USERNAME")
    except:continue

Answer 9

How about putting WebDriverWait in While loop and catching the exceptions.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get("url")
delay = 3 # seconds
while True:
    try:
        WebDriverWait(browser, delay).until(EC.presence_of_element_located(browser.find_element_by_id('IdOfMyElement')))
        print "Page is ready!"
        break # it will break from the loop once the specific element will be present. 
    except TimeoutException:
        print "Loading took too much time!-Try again"

Answer 10

Solution for ajax pages that continuously load data. The previews methods stated do not work. What we can do instead is grab the page dom and hash it and compare old and new hash values together over a delta time.

import time
from selenium import webdriver

def page_has_loaded(driver, sleep_time = 2):
    '''
    Waits for page to completely load by comparing current page hash values.
    '''

    def get_page_hash(driver):
        '''
        Returns html dom hash
        '''
        # can find element by either 'html' tag or by the html 'root' id
        dom = driver.find_element_by_tag_name('html').get_attribute('innerHTML')
        # dom = driver.find_element_by_id('root').get_attribute('innerHTML')
        dom_hash = hash(dom.encode('utf-8'))
        return dom_hash

    page_hash = 'empty'
    page_hash_new = ''
    
    # comparing old and new page DOM hash together to verify the page is fully loaded
    while page_hash != page_hash_new: 
        page_hash = get_page_hash(driver)
        time.sleep(sleep_time)
        page_hash_new = get_page_hash(driver)
        print('<page_has_loaded> - page not loaded')

    print('<page_has_loaded> - page loaded: {}'.format(driver.current_url))

Answer 11

You can do that very simple by this function:

def page_is_loading(driver):
    while True:
        x = driver.execute_script("return document.readyState")
        if x == "complete":
            return True
        else:
            yield False

and when you want do something after page loading complete,you can use:

Driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=Options, executable_path='geckodriver.exe')
Driver.get("https://www.google.com/")

while not page_is_loading(Driver):
    continue

Driver.execute_script("alert('page is loaded')")

Answer 12

use this in code :

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox() # or Chrome()
driver.implicitly_wait(10) # seconds
driver.get("http://www.......")

or you can use this code if you are looking for a specific tag :

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

driver = webdriver.Firefox() #or Chrome()
driver.get("http://www.......")
try:
    element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
        EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "tag_id"))
    )
finally:
    driver.quit()

Answer 13

Very good answers here. Quick example of wait for XPATH.

# wait for sizes to load - 2s timeout
try:
    WebDriverWait(driver, 2).until(expected_conditions.presence_of_element_located(
        (By.XPATH, "//div[@id='stockSizes']//a")))
except TimeoutException:
    pass