How to find Element by Partial Link Text using Selenium?

Contents

Introduction
Example 1: Find link element by partial link text
Example 2: No such element for given partial link text
Summary

Find Element by Partial Link Text

To find a Link Element (hyperlinks) by partial link text, using Selenium in Python, call find_element() method and pass By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT as the first argument, and the partial link text value as the second argument.

find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, "partial_link_text_value")

For an example to link text, in the following code snippet, About can be the partial link text, or 'article', or 'this article' could be partial link text.

<a href="/about/">About this article</a>

Example 1: Find link element by partial link text

In the following example, we find the link element using find_element() function, with partial link text 'New Article'.

The HTML page has two links of which one link has a link text of 'About New Article', and 'New Article' is a partial link text that matches with this link.

index.html

<html>
 <body>
  <p>Hello World!</p>
  <a href="/about/">About Hello World</a>
  <br>
  <p>New Article</p>
  <a href="/new-article/">About New Article</a>
 </body>
</html>

Python Program (Selenium)

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

service = Service(executable_path="/usr/local/bin/chromedriver")
#initialize web driver
with webdriver.Chrome(service=service) as driver:
    #navigate to the url
    driver.get('http://127.0.0.1:5500/localwebsite/index.html')
    #find element by partial link text
    myDiv = driver.find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, 'New Article')
    print(myDiv.get_attribute("outerHTML"))

Output

<a href="/new-article/">About New Article</a>

Example 2: No such element for given partial link text

If there is no element by given partial link text in the web page, find_element() function raises NoSuchElementException.

In the following example, we have taken an HTML page with two links. But, none of the two links have the partial link text as 'Policy'. So, when we try to find element by partial link text 'Policy' using find_element() function, then the function throws NoSuchElementException.

index.html

<html>
 <body>
  <p>Hello World!</p>
  <a href="/about/">About Hello World</a>
  <br>
  <p>New Article</p>
  <a href="/new-article/">About New Article</a>
 </body>
</html>

Python Program (Selenium)

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

service = Service(executable_path="/usr/local/bin/chromedriver")
#initialize web driver
with webdriver.Chrome(service=service) as driver:
    #navigate to the url
    driver.get('http://127.0.0.1:5500/localwebsite/index.html')
    #find element by link text
    myDiv = driver.find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, 'Policy')
    print(myDiv.get_attribute("outerHTML"))

Output

    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"link text","selector":"Policy"}

Summary

In this tutorial of Python Examples, we learned how to find an element by partial link text in the webpage, using Selenium.