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.

Syntax –

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 webdriver
from selenium import webdriver
  
# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
  
# enter keyword to search
keyword = "geeksforgeeks"
  
# get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")
  
# get element 
element = driver.find_element_by_class_name("gsc-input")
  
# print complete element
print(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 –
find_element-driver-method-Selenium-Python
Terminal Output –
terminal-output-find_element-method-Python-selenium

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.