I'm trying to crawl the pages that I interested in. For this, I need to remove attribute of element from HTML. 'style' is what I want to remove. So I find some codes from Stackoverflow.(i'm using Chrome for driver)

element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//select[@class='m-tcol-c' and @id='searchBy']")
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].removeAttribute('style')", element)

What does arguments[0] do in the code? Can anyone explain arguments[0]'s roles concretely?

I'm trying to crawl the pages that I interested in. For this, I need to remove attribute of element from HTML. 'style' is what I want to remove. So I find some codes from Stackoverflow.(i'm using Chrome for driver)

element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//select[@class='m-tcol-c' and @id='searchBy']")
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].removeAttribute('style')", element)

What does arguments[0] do in the code? Can anyone explain arguments[0]'s roles concretely?

• javascript
• python
• selenium
• selenium-webdriver
• webdriver

3 Answers 3

arguments is what you're passing from Python to JavaScript that you want to execute.

driver.execute_script("arguments[0].removeAttribute('style')", element) 

means that you want to "replace" arguments[0] with WebElement stored in element variable.

This is the same as if you defined that element in JavaScript:

driver.execute_script("document.querySelector('select.m-tcol-c#searchBy').removeAttribute('style')")

You can also pass more arguments as

driver.execute_script("arguments[0].removeAttribute(arguments[1])", element, "style")

element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//select[@class='m-tcol-c' and @id='searchBy']")  

Here, element is a web element.

and in this call:

driver.execute_script("arguments[0].removeAttribute('style')", element)  

You are passing element(Which is a web element) as a arguments[0]

removeAttribute('style') must be a method in JS. and using arguments[0] you are invoking this method.

As per the documentation execute_script() method synchronously executes JavaScript in the current window/frame and is defined as:

execute_script(script, *args)
    Synchronously Executes JavaScript in the current window/frame.
    Where:
        script: The JavaScript to execute.
        *args: Any applicable arguments for your JavaScript.

• As per the example you have provided:

  element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//select[@class='m-tcol-c' and @id='searchBy']")
  driver.execute_script("arguments[0].removeAttribute('style')", element)
  

• arguments[0].removeAttribute('style') : Refers to the script to be executed synchronously by execute_script() method where:

  • arguments[] would be the reference of the element which will be passed through *args
  • removeAttribute() is the method to be executed.
  • style is the attribute on which the method removeAttribute() would be invoked.
• element is the reference of the WebElement which is passed to arguments[0]

You can find a relevant discussion in What does arguments[0] and arguments[1] mean when using executeScript method from JavascriptExecutor interface through Selenium WebDriver?