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My program is throwing an error message "Stale element reference: element is not attached to the page document". When I looked at the previous posts (such as Python Selenium stale element fix),, I found that I am not updating the url after calling click function. I updated the url. However, it didn't fix the issue. Could anyone point out where am I making mistake please? Here is my code:

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions() chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-infobars") driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options,executable_path="path of driver here") driver.get("https://stackoverflow.com/users/37181/alex-gaynor?tab=topactivity") if driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//a[@class='grid--cell fc-white js-notice-close']"): driver.find_element_by_xpath("//a[@class='grid--cell fc-white js-notice-close']").click() inner_tabs = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//div[@class='tabs']//a") for inner_tab in inner_tabs: if inner_tab.text == "answers": inner_tab.click() time.sleep(3) driver.get(driver.current_url) continue if inner_tab.text == "questions": inner_tab.click() time.sleep(3) driver.get(driver.current_url) continue driver.quit()
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when you open new URL by clicking link or driver.get() it will create new document element so old element (inner_tab) will invalidate. to solve, first collect all URL then open in loop.

urls_to_visit = [] for inner_tab in inner_tabs: if inner_tab.text in ["questions", "answers"]: urls_to_visit.append(inner_tab.get_attribute("href")) for url in urls_to_visit: driver.get(url) time.sleep(3)
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I like this answer but it still requires inner_tab.get_attribute("href") to not bomb which is a bit optimistic.
@pguardiario thanks, I'm still a newbie, I need to learn more about selenium :D
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This is one of the most frustrating errors you can get with Selenium. I recommend to try it like this:

for tab in ['answers', 'questions']: js = "window.tab = [...document.querySelectorAll('div.tabs > a')].filter(a => a.innerText === '" + tab + "')[0]" driver.execute_script(js) driver.execute_script("if(window.tab) window.tab.click()") time.sleep(3) print(driver.current_url)

By selecting inside of the browser context you can avoid the stale references.

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