Working with links in selenium

Working with links in selenium

If your requirement is to identify and perform action on link it is suggested to use

1. By.LinkText()

2. By.partialLinkText() methods.

How a link designed by the HTML developers?

The tags used to produce links are the <a> and </a>.

The content inside the <a> and </a> is the linktext as shown below

If you are able to see anchor tag for the control then you can use any of the above two methods If not you cannot use LinkText() or PartialLinkText() methods.

LinkText():

If you want to use complete link text then you can use linktext method

Code:

WebElement ele=driver.findElement(By.linkText("Gmail"));

ele.click();

Partial LinkText():

If your linktext is changing dynamically i.e changing every time when you load a webpage then you have to use this method. You can identify the element with part of the linktext which is stable(Not changing) using partialLinkText() method.

Code:

WebElement ele=driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Gma"));

ele.click();

Programme to find all the links on the webpage:

import java.util.List;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class FindingAllLinks {

                public static void main(String[] args) {

                System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "");

                WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

                driver.get("http://google.com");

                // Links always starts with anchor tag so you can use            

       Findlements methods to get all the links on the webpage

List<WebElement> allLinks=driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));

               

// Use foreach loop to iterate through all the links

                for (WebElement link : allLinks)

      {

                 System.out.println(link.getText());

      }

                }

}