StaleElementReferenceException on Python Selenium

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#1

I am getting the following error while using Selenium in python:

selenium.common.exceptions.StaleElementReferenceException: Message: u'stale element reference: element is not attached to the page document\n

Interestingly enough, the error pops up at different times in the for loop. Sometimes it gets through eg. 4 iterations and other times eg. 7.

Some of the relevant code being run is:

for i in range(0, 22):
    u = driver.find_elements_by_id("data")
    text = u[0].get_attribute("innerHTML")
    driver.find_elements_by_class_name("aclassname")[0].click()

What does this error mean and what is something I can try to fix this?

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#2

Selenium Support Explicit and Implicit Waits. If you think waiting for certain amount of time is enough for your page to be loaded, use:

driver.implicitly_wait(secs)

but if you want to wait for a special event (e.g. waiting for a particular element to be loaded) you can do something like:

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
...
...
def find(driver):
    element = driver.find_elements_by_id("data")
    if element:
        return element
    else:
        return False
element = WebDriverWait(driver, secs).until(find)
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