How to click on cookie popups and modal alerts in Selenium?

Modal pop-ups are usually encountered when dealing with cookie consent popups or login request walls when scraping using Selenium. The modal pop-up is created using custom javascript that hides the content on page load and shows some sort of message like this one:

There are multiple ways to handle modal pop-ups though these are the two most common ways:

1. We can click on one of the values like "OK" or "Yes"
2. We can delete the modal element from the DOM

For example, let's take a look at web-scraping.dev/login page which on page load throws a cookie pop-up:

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
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException

driver = webdriver.Chrome()

driver.get("https://web-scraping.dev/login")

# Option #1 - use driver.find_element() to click on the button
try:
    cookie_ok_button = WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, "cookie-ok")))
    cookie_ok_button.click()
except TimeoutException:
    print("no cookie popup")


# Option #2 - delete the popup HTML
#   remove pop up
try:
    cookie_modal = WebDriverWait(driver, 2).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "cookieModal")))
    driver.execute_script("arguments[0].remove();", cookie_modal)
except TimeoutException:
    pass
#   remove grey backgdrop which covers the screen
try:
    modal_backdrop = WebDriverWait(driver, 2).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.CLASS_NAME, "modal-backdrop")))
    driver.execute_script("arguments[0].remove();", modal_backdrop)
except TimeoutException:
    pass

driver.quit()

Above, we explore two ways to handle modal pop-ups: clicking a button that would dismiss it and hard removing them from the DOM. Generally, the first approach is more reliable as the real button click can have functionality attached to it like setting a cookie so the pop-up doesn't appear again. For cases when it's a login requirement or advertisement, the second approach is more suited.