Stale Exception Web Scraping Selenium Python

I am trying to grab information from tripadvisor. I sometimes get Message: stale element reference: element is not attached to the page document (Session info: chrome=47.0.2526

Solution 1:

A Stale Element Reference Exception occurs when an element:

1. Has been deleted
2. Is no longer attached to the DOM (as in your case)
3. Has changed

From the docs:

You should discard the current reference you hold and replace it, possibly by locating the element again once it is attached to the DOM.

i.e.: "Find" the element again.

You'll need to modify the code to catch this error for the appropriate step.

from selenium.common.exceptions import StaleElementReferenceException

elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath('something leaves dom')
# ... do other actions which change the page and then later...try:
    elem.click()
except StaleElementReferenceException:
    elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath('something leaves dom')
    elem.click()

Make a re-usable a version if you need it extensively for several elements.

Btw, you should not be catching Exception in your code. Be specific about which ones you want to handle.