find_element() driver method – Selenium Python

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:  

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: 

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; }