What Caused the Python NoneType Error During My Splinter 'click()' Call? - web-scraping

Question

When trying to scrape the county data from multiple Politico state web pages, such as this one, I concluded the best method was to first click the button that expands the county list before grabbing the table body's data (when present). However, my attempt at clicking the button had failed:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
import requests
from splinter import Browser
state_page_url = "https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/washington/"
executable_path = {'executable_path': 'chrome-driver/chromedriver.exe'}
browser = Browser('chrome', **executable_path, headless=False)
browser.visit(state_page_url)
state_soup = bs(browser.html, 'html.parser')
reveal_button = state_soup.find('button', class_='jsx-3713440361')
if (reveal_button == None):
# Steps to take when the button isn't present
# ...
else:
reveal_button.click()
The error returned when following the else-condition is for my click() call: "TypeError: NoneType object is not callable". This doesn't make sense to me since I thought that the if-statement implied the reveal_button was not a NoneType. Am I misinterpeting the error message, how the reveal_button was set or am I misinterpeting what I'm working with after making state_soup?

Answer 1

Based on the comment thread for the question, and this solution to a similar question, I came across the following fix:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
import requests
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
# Navigate the page to click the desired button
state_page_url = "https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/alabama/"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='chrome-driver/chromedriver.exe')
driver.get(state_page_url)
button_list = driver.find_elements(By.CLASS_NAME, 'jsx-3713440361')
if button_list == []:
# Actions to take when no button is found
# ...
else:
button_list[-1].click() # The index was determined through trial/error specific to the web page
# Now to grab the table and its data
state_soup = bs(driver.page_source)
state_county_results_table = state_soup.find('tbody', class_='jsx-3713440361')
Note that it required selenium for navigation and interaction while BeautifulSoup4 was used to parse it for the information I'd need