find_element_by_css_selector() driver method Selenium Python (original) (raw)

Last Updated : 12 Jul, 2025

Selenium's Python Module is built to perform automated testing with Python. Selenium Python bindings provide a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. After you have installed selenium and checked out - Navigating links using the get method, you might want to play more with Selenium Python. After one has opened a page using selenium such as geeksforgeeks, one might want to click some buttons automatically or fill a form automatically or any such automated task.

This article revolves around how to grab or locate elements in a webpage using locating strategies of Selenium Web Driver. More specifically, find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR) is discussed in this article. With this strategy, the first element with the matching CSS selector will be returned. If no element has a matching CSS selector, a NoSuchElementException will be raised.

**Syntax -

driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "CSS Selectors")

**Example -

For instance, consider this page source:

HTML `

Site content goes here.

`

Now after you have created a driver, you can grab an element using -

content = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'p.content')

How to use driver.find_element_by_css_selector() method in Selenium?

Let's try to practically implement this method and get an element instance for ****"https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/"**. Let's try to grab search form input using its id "GSC-i-id2".

Create a file called run.py to demonstrate find_element_by_css_selector method -

Python3 `

Python program to demonstrate

selenium

import webdriver

from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

create webdriver object

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

enter keyword to search

keyword = "geeksforgeeks"

get geeksforgeeks.org

driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")

get element

element = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input.gsc-i-id2")

print complete element

print(element)

`

Now run using -

Python run.py

First, it will open the firefox window with geeksforgeeks, and then select the element and print it on the terminal as shown below.

**Browser Output -

**Terminal Output -

More locators for locating single elements