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Quality Assurance Introduction to Selenium Automation Nation XPath review

Jan Lundeen
Jan Lundeen
5,886 Points
Posted by Jan Lundeen
Jan Lundeen
5,886 Points

Xpath review quiz-Question on "Given the HTML code, how many elements would the following call return?"

On the Introduction to Selenium class, on of the Xpath review quiz (after Fork in the Xpath section), gives students some HTML code and asks how many elements would be found using a particular code string [starts with driver.findElement(By.xpath]. I'm not sure why this line of code would only find one instance of "sample" instead of two. I'm not sure if it's because the command used is findElement instead of findElements. Can you clear this up for me?

Thanks,

Jan

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,236 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,236 Points

You're quite right, those are different functions. The findElement (singular) returns just one element, if there are more that match it returns the first one. And it causes an error if cannot find one.

On the other hand, findElements (plural) returns a list of all the elements that match. If none are found, it returns an empty list with no error.

Jan Lundeen
Jan Lundeen
5,886 Points
Jan Lundeen
Jan Lundeen
5,886 Points

So it sounds like that's why the answer is 1 rather than 2. Thanks Steven!