Understanding what find_elements_by_xpath returns in Selenium

Question

This is my code:

mydata = driver.find_elements_by_xpath('/html/body/section/div/div/div[1]/div[4]/div/table/tbody[1]/tr/td[3]')
print(mydata)

It returns:

[<selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement (session="70471ea3d46485ab51b62586ffa7ff21", element="4877016a-a335-47f7-b46d-52dbc3604dce")>].

How do I understand this result?

Answer 1

Try this:

elements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath('/html/body/section/div/div/div[1]/div[4]/div/table/tbody[1]/tr/td[3]')
for element in elements:
    print(element) # prints element
    print(element.id) # prints the id of element
    print(element.text) # prints the text of element
    print(element.size) # prints the size of element
    print(element.location) # prints the location of element
    print(element.parent) # prints the text of element

When you use driver.find_elements_by_xpath() , as the name implies, you get multiple elements (stored in a list). To investigate all elements, you need to loop through all of them using for element in elements .

To find out what kind of information you can get (by accessing its attributes or calling its methods), you can check the docs , eg, id , location , tag_name , size , text .

Answer 2

mydata = driver.find_elements_by_xpath('/html/body/section/div/div/div[1]/div[4]/div/table/tbody[1]/tr/td[3]')
# this will print the text written within tags
print(mydata.text)

mydata is an object and you can perform opeation on this, like get text or get parent, send keys etc.