The findElement() and findElements() methods in Selenium

Overview

Selenium is a powerful tool for programmatically manipulating an internet browser. All major browsers can use it, it runs on all major operating systems, and it has scripts written in many different languages, including Python, Java, C#, and others.

Add the following dependency to pom.xml.

<dependency>
            <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
            <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
            <version>4.3.0</version>
</dependency>

Explanation

Line 4: We set the system property webdriver.gecko.driver to point to the firefox driver.
Line 5: The URL to be opened is defined.
Line 6: This is the instance of the FirefoxDriver that is defined.
Line 7: We use the get() method to open the URL/webpage.
Line 8: We define the tag name.
Line 9: We use the tag name, with the help of the findElement() method to retrieve the web element. Then, we use the getText() method to to retrieve the text of the element.
Line 10: We print the retrieved text.
Line 11: The driver is closed.

public class Main{
    public static void main (String[] args) {
        System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver","path to driver");
        String url = "https://educative.io/";
        WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
        driver.get(url);
        String tagName = "a";
        List<WebElement> allLinks = driver.findElements(By.tagName(tagName));
        for(WebElement link:allLinks){
            System.out.println(link.getText() + " - " + link.getAttribute("href"));
        }
        driver.close();
    }
}

Explanation

Line 4: We set the system property webdriver.gecko.driver to point to the Firefox driver.
Line 5: We define the URL.
Line 6: We define an instance of the FirefoxDriver.
Line 7: We use the get() method to open the URL/webpage.
Line 8: We define the tag name.
Line 9: We use the tag name, with the help of the findElements() method, to retrieve the web elements.
Line 10: For every web element extracted in line 9, we use the getText method to get the text. Then we use the getAttribute() method to get the value of the href attribute.
Line 11: We close the driver.