How to Select a Toggle Button with CSS Classes in Selenium & Python

Discover how to effectively interact with HTML elements using Selenium and Python, focusing on toggling buttons identified only by classes.
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/68514920/ asked by the user 'Steve Burgos' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/6480484/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/68515121/ provided by the user 'imxitiz' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/12446721/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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How to Select a Toggle Button with CSS Classes in Selenium & Python

When working with web automation using Selenium and Python, one common challenge is interacting with elements that may not have identifiable attributes like HTML id or title. In this guide, we will explore how to select a toggle button using only its CSS classes. This can be particularly useful when dealing with dropdown menus or toggle buttons, such as the one shown in an HTML structure.

Understanding the Problem

Let's review a scenario where you have an HTML structure that looks something like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

In this case, you want to interact with the <a> tag that has the class dropdown-toggle. However, there are no unique ids or titles to help identify it, which makes selection a bit tricky.

The Solution: Using CSS Selectors

Fortunately, you can easily select this element using CSS selectors with Selenium. Below are the steps to do this effectively.

Step 1: Import Selenium and Setup WebDriver

Make sure you have Selenium installed and set up the WebDriver for the browser of your choice. Here is an example using Chrome:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 2: Locate the Toggle Button

You can locate the toggle button using its class name. There are two approaches you can try:

Using the dropdown-toggle class:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Using the data-toggle attribute:
If the first method fails, you can use the data-toggle attribute instead:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 3: Click the Toggle Button

Once you have selected the button, you can perform the click action to toggle the dropdown menu:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Final Complete Example

Here’s a full example of how your Python script might look:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Conclusion

Identifying elements by their CSS classes can be a straightforward process when using Selenium in Python. With the right selectors and commands, you can easily interact with dropdowns, toggle buttons, and more, even when unique identifiers are not available.

Feel free to experiment with different selectors based on the specific structure of your web page, and happy automating!

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