Recently, I encountered a peculiar situation while attempting to scrape a webpage using Python selenium webdriver. It seems that when I use the find_element_by_xpath method without including time.sleep, I am unable to retrieve any information. However, as soon as I introduce a short delay with time.sleep, the desired data is successfully obtained.
The strange behavior was first noted when running the code initially without time.sleep, resulting in no output. Surprisingly, upon executing the same code again, the information was retrieved. To troubleshoot this issue, I decided to incorporate a brief pause, leading to the correct functioning of the code.
Below is an excerpt showcasing the code without time.sleep:
driver.get(link)
info = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="page-number"]').text
print info
And here is the modified version utilizing time.sleep:
driver.get(link)
time.sleep(1)
info = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="page-number"]').text
print info
Although I understand the importance of providing the URL for contextual understanding, I have refrained from disclosing the specific website being scraped.
I would greatly appreciate it if someone could offer a theoretical explanation as to why this anomaly might occur.