What is the difference between "find_element_by_name('name')" and "find_element(By.NAME, 'name')"?

Question

Examples:

# method 1
from selenium import webdriver

PATH = '...'
driver = webdriver.Chrome(PATH)
driver.get('https://google.com')
driver.find_element_by_name('q').send_keys('test')

# method 2
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

PATH = 'c:\\Program Files (x86)\\chromedriver.exe'
driver = webdriver.Chrome(PATH)
driver.get('https://google.com')
driver.find_element(By.NAME, 'q').send_keys('test')

Basically, I want to know:

1 - Are there differences between the two? If there are, what are they?

2 - Generally speaking, are there differences between these?

find_element_by_class_name(el): find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, el); 

find_element_by_name(el): find_element(By.NAME, el)

3 - Why is a DeprecationWarning shown when the first method is executed?

Answer 1

They are the same, the find_element_by_name call find_element method and pass By.NAME to by arguments. This is the source code:

def find_element_by_name(self, name):
    """
    Finds an element by name.

    :Args:
     - name: The name of the element to find.

    :Returns:
     - WebElement - the element if it was found

    :Raises:
     - NoSuchElementException - if the element wasn't found

    :Usage:
        element = driver.find_element_by_name('foo')
    """
    return self.find_element(by=By.NAME, value=name)

All the find_element_by_* methods are call find_element method with different by arguments. You should go to see selenium webdriver class sourcecode for detail.

This is selenium official api doc. https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/py/_modules/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.html#WebDriver

Answer 2

As @GuiHva also mentioned, there is no difference between the two lines:

driver.find_element_by_name('q')

and

driver.find_element(By.NAME, 'q')

as in the current release of selenium4 Python client find_element_by_name(name) under the hood still invokes:

self.find_element(by=By.NAME, value=name)

but along with a DeprecationWarning.

The current implementation of find_element_by_name() is as follows:

def find_element_by_name(self, name) -> WebElement:
    """
    Finds an element by name.

    :Args:
     - name: The name of the element to find.

    :Returns:
     - WebElement - the element if it was found

    :Raises:
     - NoSuchElementException - if the element wasn't found

    :Usage:
        ::

            element = driver.find_element_by_name('foo')
    """
    warnings.warn(
        "find_element_by_* commands are deprecated. Please use find_element() instead",
        DeprecationWarning,
        stacklevel=2,
    )
    return self.find_element(by=By.NAME, value=name)

---

Why this change

As @AutomatedTester mentions:

The decision was to simplify the APIs across the languages and this does that.