What Are Locators In Selenium WebDriver?

What are Locators in Selenium? Locators in Selenium come into action in the fourth step above, after the Selenium WebDriver is initialized and loaded the webpage to be tested. A locator enables testers to select an HTML DOM element to act on.

What are locators in Selenium?

What are Locators? Locator is a command that tells Selenium IDE which GUI elements ( say Text Box, Buttons, Check Boxes etc) its needs to operate on. Identification of correct GUI elements is a prerequisite to creating an automation script. But accurate identification of GUI elements is more difficult than it sounds.

What are locators?
Locators are the way to identify an HTML element on a web page, and almost all UI automation tools provide the capability to use locators for the identification of HTML elements on a web page.

What are the 8 locators in Selenium?

Selenium supports 8 different types of locators namely id, name, className, tagName, linkText, partialLinkText, CSS selector and xpath. Using id is one of the most reliable and fast methods of element recognition. Usually, the id is always unique on a given web page.

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What are locators available in Selenium WebDriver and which is best to use?

IDs are the safest locator option and should always be your first choice. By W3C standards, it should be unique in the page meaning you will never have a problem with finding more than one element matching the locator.

Is CSS faster than XPath?

It’s faster than XPath. It’s much easier to learn and implement. You have a high chance of finding your elements. It’s compatible with most browsers to date. You may also read, What are locker loops?

Which element locator is faster in Selenium?

IDs are the safest, fastest locator option and should always be your first choice. ID’s are supposed to be unique to each element. ID locator is faster because at its roots, it calls document. getElementById() which is very much optimized by many browsers. Check the answer of What are lockouts?

What is an XPath in Selenium?

XPath is a technique in Selenium to navigate through the HTML structure of a page. XPath enables testers to navigate through the XML structure of any document, and this can be used on both HTML and XML documents. … This post covers a variety of methods to access elements using the XPath locator in Selenium.

What is XPath axes in Selenium?

XPath axes are those axes that are used to search for the multiple nodes in the XML document from the current node context. These methods are mainly used when the web element is not identified with the help of ID, name, class name, link text, CSS selector and XPath, etc. locators. Read: What are logical absolutes?

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What is XPath and its types?

XPath is a technique in Selenium that allows you to navigate the structure of a webpage’s HTML. XPath is a syntax for finding elements on web pages. Using UXPath in Selenium helps find elements that are not found by locators such as ID, class, or name. XPath in Selenium can be used on both HTML and XML documents.

Which is faster XPath or ID?

Technically speaking, By.ID() is the faster technique because at its root, the call goes down to document. getElementById(), which is optimized by most browsers. But, finding elements using XPath is better for locating elements having complex selectors, and is no doubt the most flexible selection strategy.

Is XPath reliable?

As to which is more reliable, I’d say neither, but a slight edge to absolute. The first Xpath is relative xpath which locates the elements directly on a webpage. The second Xpath is absolute xpath which locates the element from the starting tag. Always prefer to use relative Xpath to locate the web elements.

Why XPath is not recommended?

The reason is that the infrastructure used to generate the XPath, doesn’t guarantee that the XPath will remain the same between two different executions. … The recommended way would be to use id or any other stable element identifier, or to search for a parent element and then use the relative XPath from that element.

Why is CSS so fast?

As well as helping to keep your CSS svelte, the browser will also render the elements targeted by shallow selectors faster. Browsers read selectors from right to left. The deeper the selectors are, the longer it takes for the browser to render and re-render the elements those selectors are applied to.

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What should I use CSS or XPath?

CSS selectors perform far better than Xpath and it is well documented in Selenium community. Here are some reasons, Xpath engines are different in each browser, hence make them inconsistent. IE does not have a native xpath engine, therefore selenium injects its own xpath engine for compatibility of its API.