Locating multiple elements in Selenium Python


Selenium is an effective tool for remotely manipulating a web browser. It works well for testing purposes when automating web applications. Finding items on a webpage is a crucial Selenium feature. In this lesson, we'll concentrate on utilising Python to find numerous Selenium items.

Introduction to Selenium

A well-known open-source web automation tool is Selenium. It gives programmers a means to create scripts in a variety of languages, including Python, Java, C#, etc. With Selenium, you can automate any browser-related actions, including clicking, typing, selecting, and navigating.

Setting Up Selenium

It's essential to make sure Selenium is properly configured and ready to go before we start looking for items. Here's how to set it up utilising pip:

pip install selenium

You must download a driver relevant to your browser since Selenium automates and manages web browser activity. Download the ChromeDriver, for instance, from the official Selenium website if you use Chrome.

Locating Elements in Selenium

We must first find the element in order to interact with a web page. Selenium has a number of methods for finding elements, such by ID, name, class name, link text, and others.

Selenium provides methods to locate numerous elements when we need to interact with many elements or extract information from several components.

Locating Multiple Elements

Selenium offers a number of ways to find numerous elements, such as:

  • find_elements_by_name

  • find_elements_by_id

  • find_elements_by_xpath

  • find_elements_by_link_text

  • find_elements_by_partial_link_text

  • find_elements_by_tag_name

  • find_elements_by_class_name

  • find_elements_by_css_selector

Example 1: Find_elements_by_class_name

A list of components that match the class name is returned by this function. A NoSuchElementException will be thrown if no element has a class attribute with the specified name.

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome('path_to_chromedriver')
driver.get('https://www.website.com')

elements = driver.find_elements_by_class_name('class_name')

for element in elements:
    print(element.text)

Example 2: Find_elements_by_tag_name

When we wish to extract information from tags with comparable meanings, we use this function. For instance, we can gather data from each paragraph tag on a website.

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome('path_to_chromedriver')
driver.get('https://www.website.com')

elements = driver.find_elements_by_tag_name('p')

for element in elements:
   print(element.text)

Example 3: Find_elements_by_xpath

A language called XPath is used to navigate through an XML document. It offers a number of ways to choose items, such by ID, name, etc.

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome('path_to_chromedriver')
driver.get('https://www.website.com')

elements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//div[@class="class_name"]')

for element in elements:
    print(element.text)

Conclusion

This article covered how to use Python's Selenium framework to find numerous components. When it comes to working with web elements, Selenium is a very flexible and powerful tool. For a variety of tasks, from testing online apps to scraping data from websites, it makes it possible to automate practically any action in a web browser.

Never forget to use these tools properly and to adhere to the terms of service of the website you are visiting.

Updated on: 18-Jul-2023

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