Difference Between Find Element and Find Elements in Selenium

There are differences between findElement and findElements method in Selenium webdriver. Both of them can be used to locate elements on a webpage. The findElement points to a single element, while the findElements method returns a list of matching elements.

The return type of findElements is a list but the return type of findElement is a WebElement. If there is no matching element, a NoSuchElementException is thrown by the findElement, however an empty list is returned by the findElements method.

A good usage of findElements method usage is counting the total number of images or accessing each of images by iterating with a loop.

Syntax

WebElement i = driver.findElement(By.id("img-loc"));
List<WebElement> s =
driver.findElements(By.tagName("img"));

Code Implementation

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
import java.util.List;
public class FindElementFindElementMthds{
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\Users\ghs6kor\Desktop\Java      \chromedriver.exe");
      WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
      //implicit wait
      driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
      //URL launch
      driver.get("https://www.tutorialspoint.com/upsc_ias_exams.htm");
      //identify single element
      WebElement elm = driver.findElement(By.tagName("h2"));
      String s = elm.getText();
      System.out.println("Get text on element: " + s);
      //identify all elements with tagname
      List<WebElement> i = driver.findElements(By.tagName("img"));
      //count
      int c = i.size();
      System.out.println("Number of images: " + c);
      //browser close
      driver.close();
   }
}

Output