Locating an element by id

Question

What is the difference between the following location techniques?

1. element(by.id(\"id\"));
2. element(by.css(\"#id\"));
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Answer 1

It would be a broad answer if someone tries to answer it so I will try to make it as simple as I can.

These are just different ways of finding elements using selenium. The reason why we have so many alternatives to select elements is, not always we will have id or class tagged to an element. For elements which do not have id or class or name the only option left with us is XPATH.

XPATH can be used to uniquely identify any element in an XML and since HTML (HTML 5 to be precise, if written according to standards) is an instance of XML we can use XPATH to uniquely identify every element in the file.

OK so why not use XPATH all the time? Why so many alternatives? Simple, XPATH is difficult to write. For example if we need to get the XPATH of a 'td' which belongs to a table nested inside 2 other tables. XPATH will be pretty long and most of the time we tend to make a mistake.

Finding XPATH in firefox is pretty straight forward, simply install firepath or firebug and right click on the element and select COPY XPATH.

Detailed instructions on indicators in selenium: here (presented in java but will help in general)