Selenium how to get all elements inside a WebElement

Question

I'm trying to get all the elements inside a selenium WebElement, for example:

<div>
    <element>
        <header>header</header>
        <p>Paragraph</p>
    </element>
    <element>
        <p>Another Paragraph</p>
    </element>

</div>

I want to get a list of all the elements inside including child elements, like so...

1. div
2. element
3. header
4. paragraph
5. element
6. paragraph

So I've tried this

element.findElements(By.xpath("*"))

but this would return only

1. element
2. element

So then I tried a recursive method to get all of the childs

private static ArrayList<WebElement> getAllElements(WebElement element, ArrayList<WebElement> ret) {
    ret.add(element);
    List<WebElement> childs = element.findElements(By.xpath("*"));
    for(WebElement e: childs)
        getAllElements(e,ret);
    return ret;
}
private static List<WebElement> getAllElements(WebElement element) {
   return getAllElements(element,new ArrayList<WebElement>());
}

But querying findElements() takes too long

I'm thinking there must be a xpath way, but I can't seem to find it

Answer 1

We can use WebElement.findElements method to get list of all the elements inside element.

For above HTML, to get list of all elements present inside div, we can use below code:

// Get webelement for div tag
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.tagName("div"));

// Below will return a list of all elements inside element
List<WebElement> webEleList = element.findElements(By.xpath(".//*"));

//For above given HTML it will print 5. As there are 5 elements inside div
System.out.println(webEleList.size());