Selenium Web Driver - Send Keys Not working for Chrome (xpath)

Doing a simple web browser automation and attempting to enter login information to instacart.

Program runs but having difficulty getting send_keys to input text. I'm not sure if my Xpath is incorrect or if the send_keys is not working.

The browser opens, and successfully clicks the login button. No text gets sent to the email input field.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys


options = Options()
options.add_experimental_option("detach",True)

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()), options=options)



# navigate to the Instacart website
driver.get('https://www.instacart.com')

# wait for the page to load
driver.implicitly_wait(10)

# find the login button using XPath
login_button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//*[@id='react-root']/div/header/div[2]/nav/div[2]/button[1]/span")

# click on the login button
login_button.click()

# wait for the page to load
driver.implicitly_wait(10)

email_input = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//*[@id='id-82lr01']").send_keys("johndoe@gmail.com")

Since the id of the email input gets generated automatically each time the page gets refreshed, you need to use another way to get it, this CSS Selector should work:

email_input = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input[name='email'][placeholder='Email']").send_keys("johndoe@gmail.com")

Also, you should not use driver.implicitly_wait(10) before each click, in that case you should use Explicit Waits when getting the elements or just use the implicit wait once at the beginning of the script.

Check the below code:

driver.get('https://www.instacart.com')
# set timeout of 10s across driver instance
driver.implicitly_wait(10)
# find the login button using XPath
login_button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "(//span[text()='Log in'])[1]")
# click on the login button
login_button.click()
# Enter email in the input box
driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//input[@placeholder='Email']").send_keys("johndoe@gmail.com")

Root cause, of your issue was as rightly pointed out in the other answer, dynamic value in the @id attribute. If your preferred locator is XPATH, you can use following XPATH instead:

//input[@placeholder='Email']

Suggestions/improvements below:

1. XPATH expressions below:

//*[@id='react-root']/div/header/div[2]/nav/div[2]/button[1]/span

Change to below, this is more user readable.

(//span[text()='Log in'])[1]

2. You don't need to store anything in a variable in below code as send_keys() won't return anything.

email_input = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//*[@id='id-82lr01']").send_keys("johndoe@gmail.com")

So change it to:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//input[@placeholder='Email']").send_keys("johndoe@gmail.com")

Here's a complete SeleniumBase script that can handle that login process.

pip install seleniumbase, and then run with python:

from seleniumbase import BaseCase
BaseCase.main(__name__, __file__)

class InstacartTest(BaseCase):
    def test_instacart(self):
        self.open("https://www.instacart.com/")
        self.click_if_visible("div button span svg path")  # Random pop-up
        self.click('nav button span:contains("Log in")')
        self.type('input[name="email"]', "johndoe@gmail.com")
        self.type('input[name="password"]', "PASSWORD")
        self.sleep(5)

A few things to note: :contains() is a unique seleniumbase selector that gets converted to xpath before use. A lot of selectors on that site have generated IDs, so it's best to use other attributes, such as name.