Locate Elements Using Link Text & Partial Link Text in Selenium

Locators in Selenium are used to identify the web element on the web page uniquely. There are various locators like ID, name, CSS Selector, and XPath that serve different purposes. In order to locate a particular button or a link on the web page, we use the link Text locator. In this article, you will see how to find an element using Link Text in Selenium.

Let’s get started!

What is Link Text in Selenium?

A link text is used to identify the hyperlinks on a web page.  It can be determined with the help of an anchor tag (<a>). In order to create the hyperlinks on a web page, you can use anchor tags followed by the link text.

What is Partial Link Text in Selenium?

Partial Link Text in Selenium is a type of locator used to identify and interact with links on a webpage. Unlike the “Link Text” locator, which matches the exact text of a link, the “Partial Link Text” locator allows you to identify a link by only a part of its text. This is especially useful when the link text is dynamic or too long, making it difficult to use the full text.

How to Locate Web Elements Using Link Text in Selenium? 

Now, let’s examine the linkText locator with an example. Suppose you want to locate the “Sign Up”  link, as shown in the snapshot below. How will you do that?

Let me take you through the steps.

On inspecting “Sign Up”  button – you can notice that it starts with an anchor tag in the snippet below. But this anchor tag doesn’t have any name and ID attributes. In such cases, you can use linkText locator.

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The above snippet consists of a text called “Sign Up.” I will use that text and a linkText to write my code, as shown below.

package Edureka;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
public class Locators {
public static void main(String[] args) {

//Configuring chrome driver
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:Selenium-java-edurekachromedriver_win32chromedriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

//maximizing the window and deleting cookies
driver.manage().window().maximize();
driver.manage().deleteAllCookies();
//Assigning page timeout and implicit wait
driver.manage().timeouts().pageLoadTimeout(40, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
//navigating through the particular website
driver.get("https://twitter.com/");
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Sign Up")).click(); //linkText locator for links
}
}

When you run the above Java program, chrome driver will launch Google Chrome, redirect to twitter home page and hit on the “Sign Up” button, and navigate to the next page. You can refer below snapshot for the output:

So, that’s how it works. Now let’s move further and see how to locate an element with the help of Partial Link Text.

How to Locate Elements Using Partial Link Text in Selenium?

In some situations, you may need to find links by a portion of the text in a linkText element. In such situations, you can use Partial Link Text to locate elements. Let’s take the same example and try to locate it. I will choose the “Sign Up”  link. Now, instead of pasting full text I will just give it as Sign. So, my code looks like:

driver.get("https://twitter.com/");
driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Sign")).click(); //partiallinkText locator for links

Now, when you run the above code, it will be redirected to the “Sign Up”  page as shown in the above output snapshot, but the difference is that you are using partial values to locate the links. I hope this gives you a clear understanding of how the linkText and partialLinkText locators in Selenium work.

Note:

Suppose there are multiple links with the same text value. Take a look at the below snapshot which has two buttons with the same name.

Here, both the Log in links serve the same purpose. But, you want to locate the first Log in. How will you do that? In such cases, you cannot use linkText or partialLinkText, but you can make use of other locators like XPath or CSS Selectors. If you wish to know how to identify and locate web elements using XPath and CSS Selectors, you can check out these articles on XPath in Selenium and CSS Selectors.

With this, we come to an end of this article on Link Text in Selenium. I hope it helped you and added value to your knowledge.

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