Selenium’s Python Module is built to perform automated testing with Python. Selenium Python bindings provides a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. After you have installed selenium and checked out – Navigating links using get method, you might want to play more with Selenium Python. After one has opened a page using selenium such as neveropen, one might want to click some buttons automatically or fill a form automatically or any such automated task.
This article revolves around how to grab or locate elements in a webpage using locating strategies of Selenium Web Driver. More specifically, find_element() is discussed in this article. With this strategy, the first element with the id attribute value matching the location will be returned. If no element has a matching id attribute, a NoSuchElementException will be raised.
Syntax:
driver.find_element(By.ID, "id_of_element")
Example:
For instance, consider this page source:
html
<html> <body> <form id="loginForm"> <input name="username" type="text" /> <input name="password" type="password" /> <input name="continue" type="submit" value="Login" /> </form> </body><html> |
Now after you have created a driver, you can grab an element using the below command as follows:
login_form = driver.find_element(By.ID ,"loginForm")
How to use driver.find_element() method in Selenium?
Let’s try to practically implement this method and get a element instance for “https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/”. Let’s try to grab search form input using its id “gsc-i-id2”.
Create a file called run.py to demonstrate find_element method:
Python3
# Python program to demonstrate# selenium# import webdriverfrom selenium import webdriverfrom selenium.webdriver.common.by import By# create webdriver objectdriver = webdriver.Firefox()# enter keyword to searchkeyword = "neveropen"# get neveropen.techdriver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")# get elementelement = driver.find_element(By.ID ,"gsc-i-id2")# print complete elementprint(element) |
Now run using –
Python run.py
First, it will open firefox window with neveropen, and then select the element and print it on terminal as show below.
Browser Output:
Terminal Output –
More locators for locating single elements
.math-table { border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; } .math-table td { border: 1px solid #5fb962; text-align: left !important; padding: 8px; } .math-table th { border: 1px solid #5fb962; padding: 8px; } .math-table tr>th{ background-color: #c6ebd9; vertical-align: middle; } .math-table tr:nth-child(odd) { background-color: #ffffff; }
| Locators | Description |
|---|---|
| find_element(By.ID ,”value”) | The first element with the id attribute value matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element(By.NAME ,”value”) | The first element with the name attribute value matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_xpath | The first element with the xpath syntax matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_link_text | The first element with the link text value matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_partial_link_text | The first element with the partial link text value matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_tag_name | The first element with the given tag name will be returned. |
| find_element_by_class_name | the first element with the matching class attribute name will be returned. |
| find_element_by_css_selector | The first element with the matching CSS selector will be returned. |
