Selenium WebDriver provides two special methods to find links on a page. Links can be searched either by their text or by partial text.
Finding links with partial text comes in handy when links have dynamic text. In this recipe, we will see how to use these methods to find links.
Let's create a simple test to see how finding links works in Selenium WebDriver with the following options.
Selenium WebDriver's By class provides the linkText() method to locate links using text displayed for the link. In the following example, we will locate the Gmail link displayed on the Google Home page:
WebElement gmailLink = driver.findElement(By.linkText("GMail"));
assertEquals("http://mail.google.com/", gmailLink.getAttribute("href"));Selenium WebDriver's By class also provides a method to locate links using partial text. This method is useful where developers create links with dynamic text. In this example, a link is provided to open the inbox. This link also displays the number of new e-mails, which may change dynamically. Here, we can use the partialLinkText() method to locate the link using a fixed or known portion of the link text, which in this case would be Index. The following code shows an example:
WebElement inboxLink = driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Inbox"));
System.out.println(inboxLink.getText());The linkText and partialLinkText locator methods query the driver for all the links that meet the specified text and return the matching link(s).
You can also locate links using the id, name, or class attributes, if developers have provided these attributes.