I'm reading a list of customer names and using each to find an element.

Before reading the list, I make can confirm this works when I hard-code the name,

    datarow = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(text(),'ACME Anvil Company')]")

But when I read in the customer list and use it like this, I get a NoSuchElement exception. I know I'm getting the name into the customer variable because the print statement confirms it.

for customer in customerlist:print("START OF DATA FOR CUSTOMER: " +customer)datarow = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(text(),'"+customer+"')]")

Do I have something wrong with the '" +customer+ "' part? I've tried it a bunch of different ways.

Possibly the list elements e.g. customer, includes leading or trailing white spaces. So when you print through print() statement you are overseeing those.

But when you use the xpath as:

datarow = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(text(),'"+customer+"')]")

Those whitespaces comes into play and no matches are found.

Solution

You can use the following solution:

datarow = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(.,'"+customer+"')]")

Ideally, to locate the element you need to induce WebDriverWait for the visibility_of_element_located() and you can use the following Locator Strategy:

datarow = WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//span[contains(.,'"+customer+"')]")))