Finding an element in Selenium

Question

Can someone tell me, what will be the difference between

find_element_by_xpath(my_xpath) 

and 

find_element(By.XPATH, my_xpath) 

if I use them in my code below:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

source = "https://www.edureka.co"
my_xpath = '/html/body/div[4]/div[2]/div[2]/div/div[1]/img'
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get(source)
x = driver.find_element_by_xpath(my_xpath)
y = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, my_xpath)
driver.quit()

Answer 1

Basically, they are not too different. The difference is in managing your objects: find_element() gives more flexibility, as you can create a 

locator = By.XPATH, my_xpath 

somewhere and use it as find_element(*locator) in, for example, your tests. You can simply update locator 

locator = By.CSS, my_css 

and there will be no need in updating your test code as find_element(*locator) is still valid.

Answer 2

Hi, ​both find_element_by_xpath(xpath) and find_element(By.XPath, xpath) serve the same purpose, but when you use find_element (By.XPATH, xpath) you need to create the xpath instance whereas in find_element_by_xpath() by id instance is created along with the find elements. Its better to go with find_element(by. xpath) as we have the ability to modify the instance at any time.