How to select a dropdown built as a button (Selenium/Python)

Your locator:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//select/option[contains(text(),'Choice 4')]").click()

... doesn't match the HTML you posted? I don't see a <select> element with options. Don't you want something like:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//li[contains(text(),'Choice 4')").click()

You could also select all elements with class SLP-dropdown-menu-item, and filter the one with the text you want:

elements  = driver.find_elements(By.CLASS_NAME, "SLP-dropdown-menu-item")
element = [e for e in elements if "Choice 4" in e.text][0]
element.click()

As you've discovered, not every dropdown on the page is a SELECT element in the HTML. In this case they've used CSS to format UL and LI elements to look like a dropdown. Since it's not an actual SELECT element, we can't use the typical Selenium SELECT helper methods... we need to treat this like any other HTML elements.

From your stack trace I can see two issues:

1. Your XPath, //select/option[contains(text(),'Choice 4')] is referencing a SELECT element that doesn't exist... at least not in the HTML you provided and seemingly not on the page since you're getting a NoSuchElementException.

2. Your XPath, //li[contains(text(),'Choice 4')] in the commented code should have worked... but probably didn't because you didn't have a wait. Clicking the dropdown, it likely takes a fraction of a second to open the dropdown but likely long enough that a straight driver.find_element() will probably fail because the element doesn't exist as fast as the code is running.

Solutions:

1. From the HTML provided, you shouldn't need the XPath contains(). It can be simplified to //li[text()='Choice 4']. If there is whitespace in there, you'll need to add the contains() back.

2. I would add code for a wait for each of the clicks: 1. open the dropdown, 2. select the desired option.

Updated code:

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

url = 'https://sample URL'
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get(url)

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div[data-qa='SLP-dropdown']"))).click()
wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//li[text()='Choice 4']"))).click()

Bonus: If you are going to make different selections in different scripts, I would spend a minute and write a method that takes the choice as a parameter so that it's reusable and easier to maintain.

def choice(number):
    wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
    wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div[data-qa='SLP-dropdown']"))).click()
    wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, f"//li[text()='Choice {number}']"))).click()

Now your code looks like:

url = 'https://sample URL'
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get(url)

choice(4)
...

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

# ----------------------------
# 1. Open browser
# ----------------------------
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.maximize_window()

# ----------------------------
# 2. Go to page
# ----------------------------
driver.get("https://sample_URL")   # <<< change to your URL

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)

# ----------------------------
# 3. Click the dropdown input
# ----------------------------
dropdown_input = wait.until(
    EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, "SLP-input"))
)
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].click();", dropdown_input)

# ----------------------------
# 4. Wait for the dropdown items and select Choice 4
# ----------------------------
choice4 = wait.until(
    EC.element_to_be_clickable((
        By.XPATH, "//li[contains(@class,'SLP-dropdown-menu-item')][contains(text(),'Choice 4')]"
    ))
)

# JavaScript click is safest for dynamic dropdowns
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].click();", choice4)

print("Successfully selected Choice 4!")

# ----------------------------
# 5. Close browser (optional)
# ----------------------------
# driver.quit()