The By.tagName() method

Locating an element by tag name is slightly different from the locating mechanisms we saw earlier. For example, on a  Homepage, if you search for an element with the button tag name, it will result in multiple WebElements because there are nine buttons present on the Homepage. So, it is always advisable to use the findElements() method rather than the findElement() method when trying to locate elements using tag names.

Let's see how the code looks when a search for the number of links present on a  Homepage is made:

@Test
public void byTagNameLocatorExample() {

    // get all links from the Home page
    List<WebElement> links = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));

    System.out.println("Found links:" + links.size());

    // print links which have text using Java 8 Streams API
    links.stream()
            .filter(elem -> elem.getText().length() > 0)
            .forEach(elem -> System.out.println(elem.getText()));
}

In the preceding code, we have used the By.tagName locating mechanism and the findElements() method, which return a list of all the links, that is, the a anchor tags defined on the page. On line five,  we printed the size of the list, and then printed text of only links where the text has been provided. We use the Java 8 Stream API to filter the element list and output the text value by calling the getText() method. This will generate the following output:

Found links:88
 ACCOUNT
 CART
 WOMEN
 ...