Find div element by multiple class names?

Question

<div class="value test" /> I'd like to identify that web element. It only has this two classes defined. I cannot do the following as className does not take a space separated value. What are alternatives?

@FindBy(className = "value test")
@CacheLookup
private WebElement test;

Answer 1

I don't think barak manos's answer has fully explained it.

Imagine we have few elements as the followings:

1. <div class="value test"></div>
2. <div class="value test "></div>
3. <div class="first value test last"></div>
4. <div class="test value"></div>

How XPath matches

• Match only 1 (exact match), barak's answer

  driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[@class='value test']"));
  

• Match 1, 2 and 3 (match class contains value test, class order matters)

  driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[contains(@class, 'value test')]"));
  

• Match 1, 2, 3 and 4 (as long as elements have class value and test)

  driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[contains(@class, 'value') and contains(@class, 'test')]"));
  

Also, in cases like this, Css Selector is always in favor of XPath (fast, concise, native).

• Match 1

  driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("div[class='value test']"));
  

• Match 1, 2 and 3

  driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("div[class*='value test']"));
  

• Match 1, 2, 3 and 4

  driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("div.value.test"));
  

Answer 2

Try this:

test = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[@class='value test']"));

Answer 3

If anyone still wonders, i accomplished this by connecting the class names with dots:

Python:

time_element = post.find_elements(By.CLASS_NAME, 'MUxGbd.wuQ4Ob.WZ8Tjf')[0].text

Answer 4

Class By.ByClassName

Class By.ByClassName is defined in By.java as follows:

/**
 * Find elements based on the value of the "class" attribute. If an element has multiple classes, then
 * this will match against each of them. For example, if the value is "one two onone", then the
 * class names "one" and "two" will match.
 *
 * @param className The value of the "class" attribute to search for.
 * @return A By which locates elements by the value of the "class" attribute.
 */
public static By className(String className) {
  return new ByClassName(className);
}

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This usecase

So as per the defination you can't pass multiple classes i.e. value and test as arguments to @FindBy(className = "..."). Sending multiple classes will raise an error as:

invalid selector: Compound class names not permitted

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Solution

There are multiple approaches to solve this usecase as follows:

• If the element is uniquely identified only through the classname value you can use:

  @FindBy(className = "value")
  @CacheLookup
  private WebElement test;
  

• If the element is uniquely identified only through the classname test you can use:

  @FindBy(className = "test")
  @CacheLookup
  private WebElement test;
  

• If both the classnames, value and test are mandatory to identify the element, you can use css-selectors as follows:

  @FindBy(css  = ".value.test")
  @CacheLookup
  private WebElement test;
  

• As an alternative you can also use xpath as follows:

  @FindBy(xpath   = "//*[@class='value test']")
  @CacheLookup
  private WebElement test;
  

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tl; dr

Invalid selector: Compound class names not permitted error using Selenium