Find element and Findelements

What are Find Element and Find Elements in Selenium?

The pre requisite of Find Element and Find Elements, we need to understand what is a WebElement. WebElement is an interface, and it represents an HTML element on a web page. We can find the WebElement by searching it in the DOM source. The WebDriver API provides built-in methods for it.

Find Element

The Find Element helps to find a web element(one) and returns the WebElement reference. It finds the first matching web element on the web page.

Syntax : webelement element = driver.findelement(by.locator(“value”));

Here, By is a class in WebDriver. It has the mechanism to locate a web element. It uses various locator strategies to locate the element. The locator strategy may include values like,

•   Id
•   Name
•  Class Name
•  Tag Name
•   Link Text
•   Partial Link Text
•   Xpath

The locator value helps to identify a web element uniquely. These values are found by referring to the HTML source code of the element. Example of a web element command

Example : WebElement username = driver.findElement(By.name("user"));

Find Elements :

The Find Elements helps to find web elements(more than one) and returns a list of web elements

Syntax : list< webelement>  element = driver.findelements(by.locator(“value”));

Ex :  list<WebElement> links = driver.findElements(By.tagname("a"));

In the above example, it finds the list of all links present on the web page using the tag name, “a”.

Code for the better understanding :

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 findelements{

public  static void main (string args[])

{

                WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

                driver.manage().window().maximize();

                driver.get("https://google.com/");
                List listOfLinks = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
                WebElement thirdlink = listOfLinks.get(3);
                System.out.println(thirdlink.getText());

                for(int i=0;i<listOfLinks.size();i++) {
                WebElement link = listOfLinks.get(i);
                System.out.println(link.getText());
                }
     }
}

Difference between Find Element and Find Elements

Find Element	Find Elements
1. It returns a single element on the web page.	1. It returns a list of elements on the web page.
2. It finds the first matched web element.	2. It finds all the web elements that match.
3. It doesn’t require indexing.	3. These elements are indexed from 0 and can be get using get().

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