Selenium’s Python Module is built to perform automated testing with Python. Selenium Python bindings provide a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. After you have installed selenium and checked out – Navigating links using the 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_by_css_selector() is discussed in this article. With this strategy, the first element with the matching CSS selector will be returned. If no element has a matching CSS selector, a NoSuchElementException will be raised.
Syntax –
driver.find_element_by_css_selector("CSS Selectors")
Example –
For instance, consider this page source:
HTML
< html > < body > < p class = "content" >Site content goes here.</ p > </ body > < html > |
Now after you have created a driver, you can grab an element using –
content = driver.find_element_by_css_selector('p.content')
How to use driver.find_element_by_css_selector() method in Selenium?
Let’s try to practically implement this method and get an 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_by_css_selector method –
Python3
# Python program to demonstrate # selenium # import webdriver from selenium import webdriver # create webdriver object driver = webdriver.Firefox() # enter keyword to search keyword = "neveropen" # get geeksforgeeks.org # get element element = driver.find_element_by_css_selector( "input.gsc-i-id2" ) # print complete element print (element) |
Now run using –
Python run.py
First, it will open the firefox window with neveropen, and then select the element and print it on the terminal as shown below.
Browser Output –
Terminal Output –
More locators for locating single elements
Locators | Description |
---|---|
find_element_by_id | The first element with the id attribute value matching the location will be returned. |
find_element_by_name | 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. |