Navigating a Website with Selenium Webdriver - python-3.x

Question

My goal is to automate online bill pay using Selenium for Python.
Login was successful using Webdriver with this code:
from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('https://website.com/Home')
emailElem = browser.find_element_by_id('UserName') #finds login username field
emailElem.send_keys('username') #enter the username
passwordElem = browser.find_element_by_id('UserPassword') #finds pw field
passwordElem.send_keys('password') #enters pw
passwordElem.submit() #presses submit button
After login, a new page loads, and my next step is to click on a link. The code:
browser.implicitly_wait(3) #allow new page to load (also tried 5 seconds)
click_link = browser.find_element_by_link_text("Bill & Payment")
click_link.click()
And nothing happens. No navigation to the Bill & Payment page. The actual link has a <BR> tag in it, so I also tried including the tag:
click_link = browser.find_element_by_link_text("Bill &<BR>Payment")
But still nothing. What are some other things I should try?
Errors:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/captain/.PyCharmEdu30/config/scratches/scratch_1.py", line 12, in
click_link = browser.find_element_by_link_text("Bill & Payment")#clicks link on next page
File "/home/captain/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 317, in find_element_by_link_text
return self.find_element(by=By.LINK_TEXT, value=link_text)
File "/home/captain/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 752, in find_element
'value': value})['value']
File "/home/captain/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 236, in execute
self.error_handler.check_response(response)
File "/home/captain/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 192, in check_response
raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: Unable to locate element: {"method":"link text","selector":"Bill & Payment"}
Stacktrace:
at FirefoxDriver.prototype.findElementInternal_ (file:///tmp/tmps7uj9u0l/extensions/fxdriver#googlecode.com/components/driver-component.js:10770)
at fxdriver.Timer.prototype.setTimeout/<.notify (file:///tmp/tmps7uj9u0l/extensions/fxdriver#googlecode.com/components/driver-component.js:625)

Answer 1

The error that you are experiencing is that the element that you are looking for is not in the page. In my experience with Selenium, I have found that css selectors often work the best for interactive with a website. You can also run python from the command line to test if you have a good hook value for an element by:
from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('https://website.com/Home')
element = "what you want to test here"
driver.find_element_by_id(element).click()
And you can just keep changing the value of element and running the lines as long as you keep the python interpreter open.
If the problem seems to be that Selenium doesn't wait long enough for the page to load, you can always try a wait method like:
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as ec
time = 10 # Wait for 10 seconds
by = By.CSS_SELECTOR # The type of hook the element is
hook = "css.selector.here" # The value for the hook (could also be xpath, name, id, etc.)
# Waits until either the element specified by variables by and hook is
# In the page, or the value of time seconds has passed.
WebDriverWait(self.driver, time).until(ec.presence_of_element_located((by, hook)))
driver.find_element(by, hook).click()

Answer 2

Documentation is usually too technical for me to follow, but it was pretty straightforward for Selenium Python Bindings.
Because there was some formatting in the link text, I used the partial link text method and it worked.
example from the documentation:
continue_link = driver.find_element_by_partial_link_text('Conti')

Answer 3

Try to use
click_link=driver.find_element_by_xpath(eg.xpath of 'online bill pay' link)
click_link.click()