Htmlunit - Button cannot be found

Question

I want to click a button with this code ("..." means that it was too long to copy):

<a title="theTitle" id="123654" onclick="..." >Press me!</a>

using Htmlunit. The code I have is:

try (final WebClient webClient = new WebClient()) {

        final HtmlPage page = webClient.getPage("http://pathToURL.html");

        HtmlButton button = (HtmlButton) page.getElementById("123654");

        System.out.println(button);
    }

The problem is that button is null. What is wrong with the code?

Thanks.

Answer 1

From API docs:

public class HtmlButton extends HtmlElement
implements DisabledElement, SubmittableElement, FormFieldWithNameHistory Wrapper

for the HTML element "button".

<a> is not a button, hence your program can't find it.

You want to use HtmlAnchor for that.

public class HtmlAnchor extends HtmlElement

Wrapper for the HTML element "a".