How to handle Selenium WebDriver Error: AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'click'?

When working with Selenium WebDriver to automate web interactions, it's common to encounter errors if the code isn't structured correctly. One such common issue is the AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'click'. This error occurs in Python Selenium scripts when you attempt to use the click() method on a list of web elements instead of an individual element. In this article, we’ll explain why this error happens and provide a simple solution to fix it, helping you handle Selenium WebDriver errors more effectively

Selenium is used for web automation. When automating web interactions with Selenium WebDriver, it’s common to encounter errors due to incorrect usage of methods. One such error is:

AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'click'

This error occurs when we mistakenly attempt to use the click() method on a list of elements, which doesn’t support this action. acting on the list rather than the actual element causes this error. In this article, we’ll walk through a simple Selenium script that will show how this error can be generated and then we will see how to correct it.

Example:

Let's see this through the example, In this example we simply will grab all the anchor tags on the GeeksForGeeks official website. Below is a selenium script using Python that attempts to find all <a> tags on a webpage and click on them.

# Description: This is a simple script to get the number of anchor tags in a webpage
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
import time
 
# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
 
#  get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get('https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/');

# Sleep for 5 seconds
time.sleep(5) 

# get search box
ancTags = driver.find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, 'a')

# print number of anchor tags
print(f"No of Anchors: {len(ancTags)}")

# click on the first anchor tag
ancTags.click() # This will throw an error as click() is not a method of list

# sleep for 5 seconds
time.sleep(5) 

# close the browser
driver.quit()

Output:

As we can see, it generates an error because of the incorrect usage of the click() method. The method find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, 'a') returns a list of WebElements (all anchor tags on the page in this case). However, the click() method is only available for individual WebElement objects, not for a list of elements.

When we try to use click() on atrTags, which is a list, the program raises an AttributeError because lists do not have the click() method.

Now let's fix this code, to fix this code we need either

1. click on specific element from the list of anchor tags.
2. iterate over list and click on each element individually

I want to apply click on the first element only, so in this case my fixed code will be

# Description: This is a simple script to get the number of anchor tags in a webpage
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
import time
 
# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
 
#  get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get('https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/');

# Sleep for 5 seconds
time.sleep(5) 

# get search box
ancTags = driver.find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, 'a')

# print number of anchor tags
print(f"No of Anchors: {len(ancTags)}")

# click on first anchor tag
ancTags[0].click() # corrected code

# sleep for 5 seconds
time.sleep(5) 

# close the browser
driver.quit()

This corrected python script will print the number of anchor tags found on the page and attempt to click on first one.

Output:

Conclusion

The AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'click' occurs when trying to call the click() method on a list of web elements instead of a single WebElement. To resolve this, you should either click on a specific element from the list or iterate through the list and click on each element individually.

By understanding how Selenium’s find_elements() method works and implementing the correct solution, you can prevent such errors and improve your automation scripts.