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Reputation: 80346

Selenium / lxml : Get xpath

Is there a get_xpath method or a way to accomplish something similar in selenium or lxml.html. I have a feeling that I have seen somewhere but can't find anything like that in the docs.

Pseudocode to illustrate:

browser.find_element_by_name('search[1]').get_xpath()

>>> '//*[@id="langsAndSearch"]/div[1]/form/input[1]'

Upvotes: 5

Views: 12877

Answers (3)

kavinyao
kavinyao

Reputation: 3030

This trick works in lxml:

In [1]: el
Out[1]: <Element span at 0x109187f50>

In [2]: el.getroottree().getpath(el)
Out[2]: '/html/body/div/table[2]/tbody/tr[1]/td[3]/table[2]/tbody/tr/td[1]/p[4]/span'

See documentation of getpath.

Upvotes: 6

kreativitea
kreativitea

Reputation: 1791

Whatever search function you use, you can reformat your search using xpath to return your element. For instance, 

driver.find_element_by_id('foo')
driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*@id="foo"')

will return exactly the same elements.

That being said, I would argue that to extend selenium with this method would be possible, but nearly pointless-- you're already providing the module with all the information it needs to find the element, why use xpath (which will almost certainly be harder to read?) to do this at all?

In your example, browser.find_element_by_name('search[1]').get_xpath() would simply return '//*@name="search[1]"'. since the assumption is that your original element search returned what you were looking for.

Upvotes: 3

Achim
Achim

Reputation: 15702

As there is no unique mapping between an element and an xpath expression, a general solution is not possible. But if you know something about your xml/html, it might be easy to write it your own. Just start with your element, walk up the tree using the parent and generate your expression.

Upvotes: 3

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