Difference Between findelement and findelements in Selenium Webdriver

Hello Welcome to Selenium Tutorials, In this post, we will see what is the difference between FindElement and findElements in Selenium.

Difference Between findelement and findelements in Selenium Webdriver

findElement () will return only single WebElement and if that element is not located or we use some wrong selector then it will throw NoSuchElement exception.

findElements() will return List of WebElements – for this we need to give locator in such a way that it can find multiple elements and will return you list of web elements then using List we can iterate and perform our operation.

We will discuss through the basic program  and will use http://jqueryui.com/ for our sample application.

Program 1- for findElement

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

public class findElementDemo {

 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
  
 // Open browser
  WebDriver driver=new FirefoxDriver();
  

// maximize the window

driver.manage().window().maximize();

 // open application

driver.get("http://jqueryui.com");

   // Wait for 5 seconds

Thread.sleep(5000);
  
  // Here xpath will select unique Element
   WebElement demos=driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='menu-top']/li[1]/a"));


  // click on link
  demos.click();
  
 }

}

Program 2- for findElements()

import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

public class findElementDemo {

 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
  
    // load browser
        WebDriver driver=new FirefoxDriver();


  // maximize window
  driver.manage().window().maximize();
 

 // pass url
  driver.get("http://jqueryui.com");
  

// Wait for 5 seconds
  Thread.sleep(5000);
  
  // Here below xpath will select 8 Element
  
 List<WebElement> links=driver.findElements(By.xpath(".//*[@id='menu-top']/li"));
 
 // print the total number of elements
  System.out.println("Total element is "+links.size());


 // Now using Iterator we will iterate all elements
Iterator<WebElement> i1=links.iterator();
    

// this will check whether list has some element or not
while(i1.hasNext()){
    

   // Iterate one by one
    WebElement ele1=i1.next();
    

    // get the text
    String name=ele1.getText();
    

   // print the text
    System.out.println("Elements name is "+name);
     
    }
  
 }


}

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