Why am I unable to select an item in a dropdown?

From a broader perspective there is nothing wrong in your code.

However to optimize your code you may like to:

• Induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() for the expander to be clickable.

• The texts EU Odds, UK Odds, US Odds, etc are not exactly within the <li> but within it's grand parent //li/a/span

• So to select EU Odds, UK Odds, US Odds one by one your optimized Locator Strategies can be:

  driver.get('https://www.oddsportal.com/matches/tennis/') WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, "user-header-oddsformat-expander"))).click() target = "EU Odds" WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//li/a/span[text()='" + target + "']"))).click() time.sleep(3) # for visual demonstration WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, "user-header-oddsformat-expander"))).click() target = "UK Odds" WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//li/a/span[text()='" + target + "']"))).click() time.sleep(3) # for visual demonstration WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, "user-header-oddsformat-expander"))).click() target = "US Odds" WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//li/a/span[text()='" + target + "']"))).click() 

This usecase

However even sucessfully clicking on the options with text as EU Odds, UK Odds, US Odds doesn't changes the DOM Tree. Now if you look into the HTML DOM the expander class itself is having the value as user-header-fakeselect-options. Additionally, the onclick attribute of the //li/a/span items are having return false;.

As per the discussion What's the effect of adding 'return false' to a click event listener? return false; does three separate things when called:

• Calls event.preventDefault();
• Calls event.stopPropagation();
• Stops callback execution and returns immediately when called.

Hence selecting either of the dropdown options doesn't fires the onclick event and the HTML DOM remains unchanged.

Conclusion

Possibly the DOM would change as per the onclick events when a authenticated user performs the selection after loggind in within the website.

Try this. Selenium has a special way to handle dropdown selection

First import select :

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select 

Then assign the dropdown to a variable:

dropdown_element = browser.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="exam_id"]') 

Then create an object:

dropdown_object = Select(dropdown_element) 

Finally select the option:(there will be a value for every options)

dropdown_object.select_by_value('17') 

There are two issues with the xpatי: Too many apostrophes around the text Trying to locate the wrong tag, the clickable element is the <a> tag, not the <li> tag.

Use "//a[.=' + target + ']"