Selenium - wait until element is present, visible and interactable

As per the best practices:

• If your usecase is to validate the presence of any element you need to induce WebDriverWait setting the expected_conditions as presence_of_element_located() which is the expectation for checking that an element is present on the DOM of a page. This does not necessarily mean that the element is visible. So the effective line of code will be:

  WebDriverWait(browser, 20).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".reply-button"))).click()
  

• If your usecase is to extract any attribute of any element you need to induce WebDriverWait setting the expected_conditions as visibility_of_element_located(locator) which is an expectation for checking that an element is present on the DOM of a page and visible. Visibility means that the element is not only displayed but also has a height and width that is greater than 0. So in your usecase effectively the line of code will be:

  email = WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "element_css"))).get_attribute("value")
  

• If your usecase is to invoke click() on any element you need to induce WebDriverWait setting the expected_conditions as element_to_be_clickable() which is an expectation for for checking an element is visible and enabled such that you can click it. So in your usecase effectively the line of code will be:

  WebDriverWait(browser, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".reply-button"))).click()
  

References

You can find a couple of detailed discussion in:

• WebDriverWait not working as expected
• Selenium: Check for the presence of element

After clicking the Reply button, use .visibility_of_element_located like below:

browser.find_element_by_css_selector(".reply-button").click()

# Wait for initialize, in seconds
wait = WebDriverWait(browser, 10)

email = wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.anonemail'))).get_attribute("value")
print(email)

Following import:

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

Waits documentation