Fetch all the links on a page that are within the same class

Question

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            <h4>Links</h4>  
                    <ul class="contents">                       
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                    <h4 id="Numbers">Numbers</h4>
                    <ul class="contents">                           
                        <li><a href="Link1" onclick="openlink(this,this.title);return false;">View Link1</a></li>
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I need to fetch all the hrefs on the page and click them. I tried to fetch the links using the following code but the code returns empty list.

hRefs = []

parent = browser.find_element_by_class_name("contents")

links = parent.find_elements_by_tag_name("a")
for link in links:
    hRefs.append(link)
print hRefs

This is what I get when I run the code an empty list.

[<selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement (session="386157b412d34905ae7344a206c156da", element="0.8337721961119238-2")>]

Answer 1

It does not return an empty list, it returns a list with a single <WebElement>.

parent = browser.find_element_by_class_name("contents")

Only gives back the first content block, the provided HTML also shows it only has a single <a> tag. So the result is correct :)

Try this code to get all a_elements

a_elements = []

content_blocks = browser.find_elements_by_class_name("contents")

for block in content_blocks:
    elements = block.find_elements_by_tag_name("a")
    for el in elements:
        a_elements.append(el)

print a_elements

This should show all <a> elements in each content block. Still it wont show the hrefs, if you want those replace append(element) with append(element.get_attribute("href"))

list_of_hrefs = []

content_blocks = browser.find_elements_by_class_name("contents")

for block in content_blocks:
    elements = block.find_elements_by_tag_name("a")
    for el in elements:
        list_of_hrefs.append(el.get_attribute("href"))

print list_of_hrefs

Probably it is better to find with a CSS selector so you do not have to loop twice.

   elements = browser.find_elements_by_css_selector(".contents > a")

This should return all <a> elements under elements with a class .contents

Answer 2

I was able to fetch the links using @Niels-van-Reijmersdal code and was able to click the hrefs using the text.

hRefs = []

parent = browser.find_elements_by_class_name("contents")
for link in parent:
    links = link.find_elements_by_tag_name('a')
    for l in links:
        hRefs.append(str(l.text))
        browser.find_element_by_link_text(l.text).click()   
print hRefs