title: Why am I unable to extract the information I need from this website using Selenium?
body: <p>TLDR, I can't interact with the &quot;enter your address&quot; field on this website: <a href="https://www.mymanatee.org/residents/information" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.mymanatee.org/residents/information</a>, via xpath and selenium, and want to know why.</p>
  <h2><strong>Long version</strong></h2>
  <hr />
  <p>As mentioned, the information I want is from this <a href="https://www.mymanatee.org/residents/information" rel="nofollow noreferrer">website</a>. On the website there is a generic address given, <strong>1112 Manatee Ave W</strong>, that you can search:</p>
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/aRe67.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/aRe67.png" alt="Address form filled" /></a></p>
  <p>If you scroll down, the information I want is the flood zone &quot;x&quot;:</p>
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/7lnwd.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/7lnwd.png" alt="Photo of Field I want" /></a></p>
  <p>The code I was using is to interact with the &quot;Input Address&quot; field is:</p>
  <pre><code>from selenium import webdriver
  import time
  
  driver = webdriver.Chrome()
  url = 'https://www.mymanatee.org/residents/information'
  driver.get(url)
  
  time.sleep(10) #makes sure the page fully loads
  
  floodZone = driver.find_element_by_xpath(&quot;//*[@id='inputAddress']&quot;)
  
  driver.close()
  driver.quit()
  </code></pre>
  <p>Which gives me the following error:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Unable to locate element:
  {&quot;method&quot;:&quot;xpath&quot;,&quot;selector&quot;:&quot;//*[@id='inputAddress']&quot;}   (Session
  info: chrome=90.0.4430.93)</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>Bringing me to my question, why can I not extract this information? It isn't because I'm looking for the information before the page loads, because I ran the code line by line through the terminal and still was unable to find it, despite seeing it on the screen in front of me through the driver.</p>
  <p>It took me far too long to figure out that I couldn't interact with the site using Selenium and I would like to know if there is a quick way for me to identify this in future so I don't spend needless time trying to interact with something selenium just can't.</p>
  <h2><strong>Solution / Workaround</strong></h2>
  <hr />
  <p>As promised, I will share the solution I found to get the data I wanted.  Further up the Element tree in the inspector I saw the following: (added line break for readability)</p>
  <pre><code>&lt;iframe src=&quot;https://gis-publicportal.s3-us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com/resident-info.html&quot;
  title=&quot;Resident Information Tool address lookup&quot; width=&quot;100%&quot; height=&quot;1850px&quot;&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;
  </code></pre>
  <p>and used the following code to actually get it:</p>
  <pre><code>url = 'https://gis-publicportal.s3-us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com/floodzone.html'
  driver.get(url)
  Situs_address = parcellist[7]
  address = Situs_address.replace(&quot;Situs Address: &quot;,&quot;&quot;)
  
  inputaddress = driver.find_element_by_xpath(&quot;//*[@id='inputAddress']&quot;)
  inputaddress.send_keys(address)
  python_button = driver.find_element_by_xpath(&quot;//*[@id='inputContainer']/div[2]/span[1]/span&quot;)
  python_button.click()
  time.sleep(10)
  floodzone = driver.find_element_by_xpath(&quot;//*[@id='fz']&quot;)
  </code></pre>
  <p>Obviously there is a lot more going on before we get to this step, but all together it works.</p>
  <h2>Where I need Help</h2>
  <hr />
  <ol>
  <li><p>Why couldn't I interact with the web page? Can I actually interact with page but am doing something wrong? I know I said several times &quot;Selenium can't&quot;, however I am willing to accept a <a href="https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/PEBCAK-problem-exists-between-chair-and-keyboard#:%7E:text=PEBCAK%2C%20one%20of%20many%20terms,a%20common%20class%20of%20problems." rel="nofollow noreferrer">PEBCAK</a> error.</p>
  </li>
  <li><p>If you know of a good community for Selenium, or web scraping with Python, could your recommend it to me? My last option is to ask for help, because I learn better by doing it myself, but sometimes that only goes so far.</p>
  </li>
  <li><p>If this question is written poorly, or could be done better, could you take a second to comment on that?</p>
  </li>
  </ol>
  <p>I searched stackedoverflow, as well as some other resources and even asked the python discord community for help and the ones who responded couldn't help either.</p>
  <p>In addition to Selenium, Python, and web-scraping, I am tagging AWS and HTML as the information comes from AWS (with information provided by Arc-GIS), and the page is written in HTML. I was hoping if the python/web-scraping/selenium community was unable to help, maybe the AWS/HTML community could provide some input.</p>
  <p>Thank you for your time and help.</p>