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

<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 –

Python3

# 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 –

Terminal Output –

More locators for locating single elements

.math-table {
border-collapse: collapse;
width: 100%;
}
.math-table td {
border: 1px solid #5fb962;
text-align: left !important;
padding: 8px;
}
.math-table th {
border: 1px solid #5fb962;
padding: 8px;
}
.math-table tr>th{
background-color: #c6ebd9;
vertical-align: middle;
}
.math-table tr:nth-child(odd) {
background-color: #ffffff;
}

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.

Article Tags :

Python

Selenium

Software Testing

Python-selenium

selenium