find_element_by_css_selector() driver method - Selenium Python

Selenium's Python Module is built to perform automated testing with Python. Selenium Python bindings provide a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. After you have installed selenium and checked out - Navigating links using the get method, you might want to play more with Selenium Python. After one has opened a page using selenium such as geeksforgeeks, one might want to click some buttons automatically or fill a form automatically or any such automated task. 

This article revolves around how to grab or locate elements in a webpage using locating strategies of Selenium Web Driver. More specifically, find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR) is discussed in this article. With this strategy, the first element with the matching CSS selector will be returned. If no element has a matching CSS selector, a NoSuchElementException will be raised.

Syntax - 

driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "CSS Selectors")

Example - 

For instance, consider this page source: 

Now after you have created a driver, you can grab an element using - 

content = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'p.content') 

How to use driver.find_element_by_css_selector() method in Selenium?

Let's try to practically implement this method and get an element instance for "https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/". Let's try to grab search form input using its id "GSC-i-id2". 

Create a file called run.py to demonstrate find_element_by_css_selector method -  

Now run using - 

Python run.py

First, it will open the firefox window with geeksforgeeks, and then select the element and print it on the terminal as shown below. 

Browser Output - 

Terminal Output - 

More locators for locating single elements