当有href数据时，li元素的href属性显示为null

Question

I am trying to iterate over a collection of li elements in an ordered list and then print the URL from each element.

The HTML:

<div id="global-atoz-navigation">
  <nav role="navigation" aria-label="Suppliers">
    <ol>


          <li class="selected">
            <span class="visuallyhidden">Suppliers starting with </span>
            <strong>A</strong>
          </li>



          <li>
            <span class="visuallyhidden">Suppliers starting with </span>
            <a href="/g-cloud/suppliers?prefix=B">B</a>
          </li>



          <li>
            <span class="visuallyhidden">Suppliers starting with </span>
            <a href="/g-cloud/suppliers?prefix=C">C</a>
          </li>
</ol>
</nav>
</div>

My code so far:

WebElement navDiv = driver.findElement(By.id("global-atoz-navigation"));
List<WebElement> links = navDiv.findElements(By.tagName("li"));
for (WebElement link : links) {
    System.out.println(link.getAttribute("href"));

}

But for some reason this is printing 'null' for each li element. Any ideas why?

Answer 1

Your <li> elements don't have an href attribute. The <a> elements inside them do. Is there a reason you wouldn't do navDiv.findElements(By.tagName("a")) to find those instead? Or, if there could be anchors you want to avoid, either get all the anchors and filter the bad ones out, or get all the list items and do another li.findElements(By.tagName("a")) on each one.

Please note that <li> isn't short for "link". It's short for "list item".

Links are in the "anchor", or <a> , element.

Answer 2

Referencing from the answer here:

JSP getAttribute() returning null

"You are not typecasting it to String. request.getAttribute() will return an Object."

Try using this and see if it works:

String value = (String)link.getAttribute("href");

What's also true is ErikE's answer where you should be grabbing the attributes for the < a > tags not the < li > tags