CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xpathselenium
Chris Mccabe
Chris Mccabe

Reputation: 1951

XPath element number returns all elements instead than first

I am using the following code to access a link (for phpunit/selenium):

//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/a[.='delete']

using an XPath checker in FireFox it returns 7 elements (because there are 7 links matching "test title 2"), but when I add [1] at the end:

//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/a[.='delete'][1]

it still returns 7 links. What am I doing wrong here?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3788

Answers (2)

Aleh Douhi
Aleh Douhi

Reputation: 1988

When you add [1] in the end of your expression, you select the first a child of each ...td[3] (i.e. 7 a child nodes). You can change your query to:

xpath=(//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/a[.='delete'])[1]

or in case you use webdriver (xpath prefix is not needed):

(//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/a[.='delete'])[1]

This will select the first a from the entire set of a children of ...td[3] elements.

Refer to XPath Examples for more tutorials.

Upvotes: 6

Petr Janeček
Petr Janeček

Reputation: 38444

As the spec says:

The location path //para[1] does not mean the same as the location path /descendant::para[1]. The latter selects the first descendant para element; the former selects all descendant para elements that are the first para children of their parents.

Therefore,

//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/descendant::a[.='delete'][1]

will do a better job in your case.

Upvotes: 0

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