What are the differences between findElement() and findElements() methods?

findElement() and findElements() method tries to search an element in DOM.

The differences between them are listed below −

Example

Using findElements ().

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.Keys;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
public class RowFindElements {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\Users\ghs6kor\Desktop\Java\chromedriver.exe");
      WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
      String url = "https://www.tutorialspoint.com/plsql/plsql_basic_syntax.htm";
      driver.get(url);
      driver.manage().window().maximize();
      driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
      // xpath with index appended to get the values from the row 1of table using findElements() ,       which returns a list
      List<WebElement> rows = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//table/tbody/tr[2]/td"));
      System.out.println(“The number of values in row 2 is “+ rows.size());
      driver.close();
   }
}

Example

Using findElement ()

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.Keys;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
public class CssTagname {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver",    "C:\Users\ghs6kor\Desktop\Java\chromedriver.exe");
      WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
      String url = "https://www.tutorialspoint.com/index.htm";
      driver.get(url);
      driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(12, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
      //Using id tagname attribute combination for css expression
      //and get the element from findElement()
      driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input[name=’search’]")).
      sendKeys("Selenium");
      driver.close();
   }
}