Find Element by Tag Name

About this lesson

By.tagName in Selenium Java: find elements by their HTML tag

Learn Selenium JavaBeginnerLocators

How it works

By.tagName("h2") matches elements by their HTML tag. Tag names in an HTML page are case-insensitive, so h2 and H2 find the same heading. On its own it is a blunt instrument, because most tags appear many times; on Text Fields there are seven input elements, and field 3 is a textarea.

It shines in two situations. One is a tag that occurs once on the page, like the single h2 heading here. The other is searching inside an element you already have: calling findElements(By.tagName("td")) on a table row returns just that row's cells, which the table lessons rely on.

About the assignment

The Text Fields page has exactly one h2, the page heading. You will locate it by tag name and print the text a reader sees on the page.

What you will do

Locate the heading with driver.findElement() and By.tagName().
Read its visible text with getText().
Print the text after the label Heading:.

Common mistakes

Assuming the first tag is the one you want
By.tagName("label") on this page returns the first label, the one for field 1. A tag locator gives no way to say which occurrence you meant, so narrow it with a parent element or switch to CSS.
Reading the wrong page's heading
Headings are not reliable page identifiers. On the Text Messages practice page the h2 also says Text Fields, because it was copied; the window title is a better check of where you are.
Using getAttribute("text")
Visible text is not an attribute. getAttribute("text") returns null for a heading, while getText() returns what is rendered.

In a real test suite

Tag locators mostly appear in scoped searches: rows inside a table, option elements inside a select, li items inside one menu. Searching the whole page by tag is usually a sign that a better locator exists.

Lesson 8 introduces a locator that only works on one tag, the a element, and matches it by the text of the link.

Read Table Headers with findElements()A scoped tag search: every th inside one table.
Get Element Text with getText()More on getText() and how it treats spaces and nested tags.
Find Multiple Elements with findElements()Return every match of a tag instead of only the first.

To try one of these calls on any page without a task, open the Online Selenium Java Compiler.

Starter code

The editor above opens with this code. Fill in the TODO lines, then run and submit it.

Main.java

import org.openqa.selenium.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
        driver.get("https://testkru.com/Elements/TextFields");
        
        // TODO: Find the h2 element by tag name
        // TODO: Print its text in format: "Heading: <text>"
        
        driver.quit();
    }
}

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