find_element_by_class_name() 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 geeksforgeeks, 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_by_class_name() is discussed in this article.
driver.find_element_by_class_name("class_of_element")
Example –
For instance, consider this page source:
<html> <body> <p class="content">Site content goes here.</p></body><html> |
Now after you have created a driver, you can grab an element using –
content = driver.find_element_by_class_name('content')
How to use driver.find_element_by_class_name() 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 class name “gsc-input”.
Create a file called run.py to demonstrate find_element_by_class_name method –
# Python program to demonstrate# selenium # import webdriverfrom selenium import webdriver # create webdriver objectdriver = webdriver.Firefox() # enter keyword to searchkeyword = "geeksforgeeks" # get geeksforgeeks.org # get element element = driver.find_element_by_class_name("gsc-input") # print complete elementprint(element) |
Now run using –
Python run.py
First, it will open firefox window with geeksforgeeks, and then select the element and print it on terminal as show below.
Browser Output –
Terminal Output –
More locators for locating single elements
| Locators | Description |
|---|---|
| find_element_by_id | The first element with the id attribute value matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_name | The first element with the name attribute value matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_xpath | The first element with the xpath syntax matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_link_text | The first element with the link text value matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_partial_link_text | The first element with the partial link text value matching the location will be returned. |
| find_element_by_tag_name | The first element with the given tag name will be returned. |
| find_element_by_class_name | the first element with the matching class attribute name will be returned. |
| find_element_by_css_selector | The first element with the matching CSS selector will be returned. |
