Tag Name Locator In Selenium

In The Previous post of Java Selenium tutorial, we have already discussed a few of the locators like ID, Name, and class name locators. Now in this post, we are going to discuss how to locate elements by using the tag name locator. you can find out how to locate the elements with the help of other locators links you can find below.

How To Locate Element By Tag Name Locator In Selenium

In the previous post, we have seen “locators in Selenium“. In this post, we discuss “How To Locate Element By Tag Name Locator”. Find the below links on How to find elements on a web page using different types of locators.

• How To Locate Element By ID Locator
• How To Locate Element By Name Locator
• How To Locate Element By Class Name Locator
• How To Locate Element By Link Text/Partial Link Text Locator
• How To Locate Element By CSS Selector Locator
• How To Locate Element By XPath Locator

What is a tagName locator in Selenium?

Before starting how to find out an element with the help of using Tag name it’s better to understand whats a tag name?

The tag name is nothing but a part of the DOM structure, where you can see the elements on the page which is defined by any of the tags like input tag for input text box, button tag for buttons, and anchor tags for the anchors.

The other locators like Name, ID, and Class Name have multiple attributes like name, id, and value class, etc. As for the ID, Name, and class names locators in selenium, we use the values for locating the elements, but in the case of tagName, we are using the tagName to identify the elements.

Some of the DOM Structures which are used to locate the elements of a Page:

Input Box: <input type="email" class="inputtext" name="email" id="email" data-testid="royal_email">

Signup Button: <button type="submit" name="websubmit" id="u_0_15" class="_6j mvm _6wk _6wl _58mi _3ma _6o _6v">Sign Up</button>

Link: <a href="/pages/create/?ref_type=registration_form">Create a Page</a>

From all discussed locators now you can think about when we are going to use this tag name locator in the Selenium webDriver. So the answer to these questions is supposed there is an element in the web page that does not have ID, class, or name and you need to locate the elements. In that case, we are going to use the tagName locator.

Note: When you try to find your required elements, then in that time if you have used tagName to locate the elements, you may get so many elements. So when you try to get an element that time it will fetch the first element.

tagName Locator With Real-Time Examples:

In this example, we are going to discuss how we can get the ALt text of an image using the tag name.

package com.selenium.practice.locator;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class TagLocatorExample 
{
   public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException 
   {
      WebDriver driver;
      System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","Path Of Browser driver File");
      
      driver=new ChromeDriver();
      driver.get("https://softwaretestingo.blogspot.com/2020/08/tag-locator-practice-example-1.html");
      driver.manage().window().maximize();
      Thread.sleep(10000);
      
      WebElement imgElement=driver.findElement(By.tagName("img"));
      String imgText=imgElement.getAttribute("alt");
      
      System.out.println("Alt Text Of Image: "+imgText);
      driver.close();
   }
}

tagName Locator Example 2

Using the tagName we can also find out the total number of similar type elements of a web page. So in this example, we are going to find out how many links are present on a web page and going to display their respective text if present for those links.

package com.selenium.practice.locator;

import java.util.List;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class TagLocator_Linkcount 
{
   public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException 
   {
      WebDriver driver;
      System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","Path Of Browser Driver File");
      
      driver=new ChromeDriver();
      driver.manage().window().maximize();
      driver.get("https://softwaretestingo.blogspot.com/2020/08/tag-locator-practice-example-1.html");
      Thread.sleep(10000);
      
      List<WebElement> list=driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
      int size=list.size();
      System.out.println("In this page we have found "+size+" links ");
      
      //printing the Text of the respective Links
      for(int i=0;i<size;i++)
      {
         System.out.println(list.get(i).getText());
      }
      
      driver.close();
   }
}

Output:

Note: There are 10 Links Present on the Webpage but few links does not have any text. In that case, in the console we are getting blank lines and wherever text is present we are able to see that in our console.

I Hope with this tutorial and the above real-time examples, and you can able to get a good idea about how to use the tagName locator in selenium. If still if you have any doubts or suggestions to improve this blog post then let us know in the comment section.