02. Selenium | Finding Element

1. Intro

There are various ways to locate elements on a web page.

Selenium helps you find elements through the following methods.

  • find_element_by_id()

  • find_element_by_name()

  • find_element_by_xpath()

  • find_element_by_css_selector()

  • find_element_by_link_text()

  • find_element_by_partial_link_text()

  • find_element_by_class_name()

  • find_element_by_tag_name()

 

If you want to find multiple elements, you can use the following methods.

  • find_elements_by_id()

  • find_elements_by_name()

  • find_elements_by_xpath()

  • find_elements_by_css_selector()

  • find_elements_by_link_text()

  • find_elements_by_partial_link_text()

  • find_elements_by_class_name()

  • find_elements_by_tag_name()

 

Apart from the methods given above, there is one more method which might be useful.

driver.find_element(By.Xpath, "xpath expression")
driver.find_elements(By.Xpath, "xpath expression")

 

2. Practice web page

I will find elements using the Instagram web page.

URL: https://www.facebook.com/

 

3. Finding elements

The code for the Email field is below.

# by ID
elementById = driver.find_element(By.ID, "email")

# by Name
elementByName = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "email")

# by Xpath
elementByXpath = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="email"]')

# by CSS Selector
elementByCss = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "#email")

# by Link Text
elementByLinkText = driver.find_element(By.LINK_TEXT, "Forgot password")

# by Partial link text
elementByPartialLinkText = driver.find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, "For")

# by class Name
elementByClassName = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "inputtext")

# by Tag Name
elementByTagName = driver.find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "h2")

 

 

4. Practice

import time

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

class FindByElement():
  def test(self):
    baseUrl = "https://www.facebook.com/"
    s = Service('E:\\workspace_python\\drivers\\chromedriver.exe')
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=s)
    driver.get(baseUrl)

    elementTagName = driver.find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "h2")
    text = elementTagName.text
    if elementTagName is not None:
      print("We found an element by Tag name and the Text is " + text)

    elementByName = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "email")
    elementByName.send_keys("test@test.com")
    time.sleep(3)

ff = FindByElement()
ff.test()