Selenium WebDriver can't find element by link text

Question

I\'m trying to select an element that includes an anchor, but the text is buried in a paragraph inside of a div. Here\'s the HTML I\'m working with:

Answer 1

A CSS selector approach could definitely work here. Try:

driver.findElement(By.CssSelector("a.item")).Click();

This will not work if there are other anchors before this one of the class item. You can better specify the exact element if you do something like "#my_table > a.item" where my_table is the id of a table that the anchor is a child of.

Answer 2

This doesn't seem to have <a> </a> tags so selenium might not be able to detect it as a link.

You may try and use

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@class='ng-binding']")).click();

if this is the only element in that page with this class .

Answer 3

Use xpath and text()

driver.findElement(By.Xpath("//strong[contains(text(),'" + service +"')]"));

Answer 4

The problem might be in the rest of the html, the part that you didn't post.

With this example (I just closed the open tags):

<a class="item" ng-href="#/catalog/90d9650a36988e5d0136988f03ab000f/category/DATABASE_SERVERS/service/90cefc7a42b3d4df0142b52466810026" href="#/catalog/90d9650a36988e5d0136988f03ab000f/category/DATABASE_SERVERS/service/90cefc7a42b3d4df0142b52466810026">
<div class="col-lg-2 col-sm-3 col-xs-4 item-list-image">
<img ng-src="csa/images/library/Service_Design.png" src="csa/images/library/Service_Design.png">
</div>
<div class="col-lg-8 col-sm-9 col-xs-8">
<div class="col-xs-12">
    <p>
    <strong class="ng-binding">Smoke Sequential</strong>
    </p>
    </div>
</div>
</a>

I was able to find the element without trouble with:

driver.findElement(By.linkText("Smoke Sequential")).click();

If there is more text inside the element, you could try a find by partial link text:

driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Sequential")).click();

Answer 5

find_elements_by_xpath("//*[@class='class name']")

is a great solution