Hiii team, why I'm getting this ClassCastException below mentioned exception? - selenium

Question

// this is the exception I am getting
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException: class sun.net.www.protocol.mailto.MailToURLConnection cannot be cast to class java.net.HttpURLConnection (sun.net.www.protocol.mailto.MailToURLConnection and java.net.HttpURLConnection are in module java.base of loader 'bootstrap')
// this is what I tried
package brokenLinks;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
//import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.time.Duration;
import java.util.List;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import io.github.bonigarcia.wdm.WebDriverManager;
public class ValidateBrokenLinksTest {
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
//set up the webdriver driver
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();
//launch chrome driver
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
//maximize the window
driver.manage().window().maximize();
//load the url
driver.get("https://testerscafe.in/");
//implicit wait for page to load
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(Duration.ofSeconds(30));
//get all the links in the webpage using tagName called "a" and store them inside list collection
List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
//get the total number of links available
int size = elements.size();
System.out.println("Number of links available in the webpage :"+size);
//iterate from each link and get the attribute value of each link
for(WebElement links : elements) {
String link = links.getAttribute("href");
//load all the links to URL class
URL url = new URL(link);
//set up the connection
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection)(url.openConnection());
connection.connect();
//validatation
if(connection.getResponseCode()>=400) {
System.out.println(link+" ==> is a broken link");
}
else {
System.out.println(link+" ==> is a valid link");
}
}
//close the webdriver
driver.quit();
}
}

Answer 1

Some of the links on that page are email addresses (info#testerscafe.in). For email links url.openConnection() helpfully returns a MailToURLConnection instead of an HttpURLConnection.
You can exclude the email links and get just the http links with xpath.
Instead of
List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
use
List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//a[starts-with(#href,'http')]"));
See this post regarding how the starts-with xpath works.