What you will Learn in this blog:

1. linkText() method usage in selenium
2. partialLinkText() method usage in selenium
3. Source code

linkText() method usage in selenium

Let us now see the usage of ‘linkText()’ method in selenium.

Launch https://www.bbc.com/ 

There are many links on the home page like News, Sport etc as can be seen below

Let us inspect any link. 

Notice below that the link is represented by tag ‘a’

We can easily click this link by using linkText() method, see below. This method uses an exact match against the text present on website (in this example, the exact text should be ‘News’)

When you run this script, notice that the ‘News’ link gets clicked and the ‘News’ page opens as shown below

Let us now click ‘Sport’ link

Save and execute, the sports page comes up

Let us now change ‘Sport’ to ‘sport’ and see whether sport link will be clicked or not

Execute, notice below we get ‘NoSuchElementException’

This means that, the text is case sensitive and hence we should write the exact text that is seen on website.

PartialLinkText() method usage in selenium

Launch https://www.bbc.com/ 

Right click and inspect any news. As an example, the text of the below news is quite huge ‘Record surge in days over key 1.5C warming limit’. In such cases, it is not a good idea to use linkText(), because, in that case, we have to write the entire text for the exact match     

Instead, we can use ‘partialLinkText()’ method. The advantage with this method is that, we can use only a partial text instead of whole text. So if you see the above figure, we can use partial text, for example, ‘over key’ to find the link and click it

When you run this script, notice below that the link is clicked and the news page opens

Next, if we change ‘over key’ to ‘Over key’ and run the script, we will get the ‘NoSuchElementException’ as expected. The text is case-sensitive 

Let us see another example, launch https://www.udemy.com/course/selenium-real-time-examplesinterview-questions/ 

Inspect the link ‘Rahul Shetty’

Let us use the partial text of this link ‘Shetty’ to click the link

Execute the script.

Notice that the link is clicked and the page scrolls down

So this is how we can use linkText() and partialLinkText() methods to click the links on a webpage.

Source code

package Intro;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

import io.github.bonigarcia.wdm.WebDriverManager;

public class SeleniumScript {

public static void main(String[] args) {

WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup();

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

//linkText method

driver.get("https://www.bbc.com/");

driver.findElement(By.linkText("News")).click();

driver.navigate().back();

driver.findElement(By.linkText("Sport")).click();

driver.navigate().back();

//partialLinkText method

driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("over key")).click();

driver.get("https://www.udemy.com/course/selenium-real-time-examplesinterview-questions/");

driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Shetty")).click();

}

}

Thank you for reading!