How to select element by class when multiple elements match?

Question

If I select flight departure time with class name through selenium in python but class name is used by both div & span tags it fails.

How can I select only one element type (div) and not sdpans.

my code is:

[element.text for element in self.browser.find_elements(By.CLASS_NAME, "dept-time")]

Answer 1

To select the div with the class you can use css (preferred for readability)

BY.css

Example

driver.find_element(By.CSS, 'div.dept-time')

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or xpath

BY.xpath

Example

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//div[@class=dept-time]

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or if there are multiple classes for that element, use

contains

Example

//div[contains(@class, 'dept-time')]

If more than 1 div element with that class exist and you want the first one you can also use:

[1]

Example (XPATH)

//div[@class='dept-time'])[1]

Example (CSS)

div.dept-time:first

Answer 2

Using css selectors, instead of class, the syntax to select the tag with a specific class/attribute is tag[attribute='value']. So in your case:

[element.text for element in self.browser.find_elements(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div[class='dept-time']")]

More information on css selectors: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.asp