Finding Elements in Python Selenium

Table of content

WebElement in Python
Sample HTML for Locators Example
Find Elements in Selenium python

WebElement in Python

Webelement is anything present on the webpage such as textbox, text, button, link, table, radio button, checkbox, etc. Before performing any action on webelement ( typing, clicking, selecting, etc.), selenium has to identify those elements uniquely.

Locating Web Elements in Selenium Python

To interact with UI objects with Selenium python, we need to identify webpage elements fast and in an accurate way (sometimes uniquely). We can find the web elements on a webpage using locators provided by selenium python; Selenium python offers 8 types of locators.

Methods to find Web element in selenium python

Below are few ways to find a web element based on the locators in Selenium python bindings:

Find Element by ID
Find Element By Name
Find Element By Class Name
Find Element by tagname
Find Element by Link Text
Find Element By partial LinkText
Find Element By CSS Selector
Find Element By Xpath

All the above method raises a NoSuchElementException when there is no matching element on the webpage.

Database testing in Python

The priority of Locators in Selenium

Automation developers should use the locator in the below order; so that the failures will get reduced; if id has more than one match then the user should try with Name so on...

Id
Name
ClassName
CSS
Xpath

Xpath in Python Selenium

Sample HTML for Locators Example

Store below Html code in your local system with .html format, and open in chrome or any other browser.

<html>
	<body>
		<div id="pancakes">
			<a href="https://chercher.tech" >Selenium Webdriver</a>
			<button id="firstButton" type="button">Blueberry</button>
			<button type="button" name="Ban" class="Banana">Banana</button>
			<button type="button" name="cake" value="Strawberry">Strawberry</button>
		</div>
	</body>
</html>

locator-selenium-python

Install Selenium Python Step by step

Find Element by Id

We can use find_element_by_id method when you know the id attribute of an element. This method returns the first matching element if there is more than one match.

The below code points to the element which has id as pancakes

driver.find_element_by_id("pancakes")

Find Element By name.

We can use find_element_by_name method when you know the name attribute of an element. Find Element By name method returns the first occurring element which has a matching name attribute.

The below code tries to find the element which has a name as Ban.

driver.find_element_by_name("Ban")

Locating Elements by Tag Name

Tagname is nothing but the item used or a tag used to form that particular element; This method returns the first matching element, if there is no match then raises a NoSuchElementException

driver.find_element_by_tag_name("button")

Find Element using Hyperlinks.

We can find the element using the hyperlink text present in the link element; we can either use partial text or Link text methods to find the element.

Use find_element_by_link_text method to find elements when the hyperlink is static
Use find_element_by_partial_link_text method when a certain part of the string keeps changing.

# finds element based full match
driver.find_element_by_link_text("Selenium Webdriver")
#find element based on partial text
driver.find_element_by_partial_link_text("Webdriver")

Find element using Xpath.

Please read the Xpath Tutorial for more excellent knowledge. Xpath is nothing but an XML path, as HTML is also one kind of XPath, so we can use XPath to find the element inside the HTML document.

Xpath is nothing but a combination of attributes to find the element, as when we try to find elements using the above-said locators you may have other matches also along with the target match.

Valid XPath locators can be:

xpath=//button[@name="Ban"] - matches with banana
xpath = //*[@value='Strawberry'] - matches with strawberry

Find element using CSS Selector.

CSS Selector is the combination of an element selector and a selector value that identifies the web element within a web page. The composite of an element selector and selector value is known as the Selector Pattern. Please read building CSS Selector for more excellent knowledge.

CSS Selector with Python

Find Elements in Selenium python

All the above-said methods will only one matching element even there more than one, but still, they will return one element. Sometimes we may need to find all the matching elements on the webpage, in such cases, we can use below methods, these also will follow the same principles, but these will return all the matching elements

These methods will return a list of web elements but there is no matching element then these returns 0 elements in the list, but these will not raise an exception.

find_elements_by_name
find_elements_by_xpath
find_elements_by_link_text
find_elements_by_partial_link_text
find_elements_by_tag_name
find_elements_by_class_name
find_elements_by_css_selector

Dropdowns in Selenium python

Find element and Find Elements.

Apart from all the above-said methods, we have two more methods, which are find_element, find_elements. These methods will accept two parameters, one type of locator, and the second one is the locator value.

driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "#pancakes")
driver.find_elements(By.XPATH, "//a")