StaleElementReferenceException on Python Selenium

Question

I am getting the following error while using Selenium in python:

selenium.common.exceptions.StaleElementReferenceException: Message: u\'stale element referen         


        

Answer 1

Selenium Support Explicit and Implicit Waits. If you think waiting for certain amount of time is enough for your page to be loaded, use:

driver.implicitly_wait(secs)

but if you want to wait for a special event (e.g. waiting for a particular element to be loaded) you can do something like:

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
...
...
def find(driver):
    element = driver.find_elements_by_id("data")
    if element:
        return element
    else:
        return False
element = WebDriverWait(driver, secs).until(find)

Answer 2

In my case, the problem

stale element reference: element is not attached to the page document

was because I tried to use actions.move_to_element(element).perform() on actions that created from old Selenium tab.

So the solution is to create new actions instance after opening new tab:

actions = ActionChains(browser)
actions.move_to_element(element).perform()

Answer 3

>>>Stale Exceptions can be handled using **StaleElementReferenceException** to continue the for loop execution.  

from selenium.common import exceptions  

# and customize your code of for loop as:  

for i in range(0, 22):  
   try:  
        u = driver.find_elements_by_id("data")  
        text = u[0].get_attribute("innerHTML")  
        driver.find_elements_by_class_name("aclassname")[0].click()  
   except exceptions.StaleElementReferenceException,e:
        print(e)
        pass  

Note: Python 3+ : replace exceptions.StaleElementReferenceException,e -> exceptions.StaleElementReferenceException as e