CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxpathselenium
Dominic Larkin
Dominic Larkin

Reputation: 1274

Selenium Webdriver finding an element in a sub-element

I am trying to search for an element in a sub-element with Selenium (Version 2.28.0), but selenium does not seem to limit its search to the sub-element. Am I doing this wrong or is there a way to use element.find to search a sub-element?

For an example I created a simple test webpage with this code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <body>
        <div class=div title=div1>
            <h1>My First Heading</h1>
            <p class='test'>My first paragraph.</p>
        </div>
        <div class=div title=div2>
            <h1>My Second Heading</h1>
            <p class='test'>My second paragraph.</p>
        </div>
        <div class=div title=div3>
            <h1>My Third Heading</h1>
            <p class='test'>My third paragraph.</p>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

My python (Version 2.6) code looks like this:

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

# Open the test page with this instance of Firefox

# element2 gets the second division as a web element
element2 = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@title='div2']")

# Search second division for a paragraph with a class of 'test' and print the content
print element2.find_element_by_xpath("//p[@class='test']").text 
# expected output: "My second paragraph."
# actual output: "My first paragraph."

If I run:

print element2.get_attribute('innerHTML')

It returns the html from the second division. So selenium is not limiting its search to element2.

I would like to be able to find a sub-element of element2. This post suggests my code should work Selenium WebDriver access a sub element but his problem was caused by a time-out issue.

Can anyone help me understand what is happening here?

Upvotes: 102

Views: 125845

Answers (6)

Muhammad Qaiser Abas Khan Sial
Muhammad Qaiser Abas Khan Sial

Reputation: 140

Find The Child of any Elements

parent = browser.find_element(by=By.XPATH,value='value of XPATH of Parents')
child = parent.find_elements(by=By.TAG_NAME,value='value of child path')

Upvotes: 0

svvc
svvc

Reputation: 33

Chrome Webdriver:

element = driver.find_element_by_id("ParentElement")
localElement = element.find_element_by_id("ChildElement")
print(localElement.text)

Upvotes: 0

Hrvoje
Hrvoje

Reputation: 15252

This is how you search for element or tag in CSS subclass and I believe that it works for multilevel situation as well:

Sample HTML:

<li class="meta-item">
 <span class="label">Posted:</span>
 <time class="value" datetime="2019-03-22T09:46:24+01:00" pubdate="pubdate">22.03.2019 u 09:46</time>
</li>

This is how you would get pubdate tag value for example.

published = driver.find_element_by_css_selector('li>time').get_attribute('datetime')

Upvotes: 1

efraim.lima
efraim.lima

Reputation: 63

I guess, we need use method By from webdriver.common.by when use driver.find_element.

So...the code must be:

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

element2 = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//div[@title='div2']")
element2.find_element(By.XPATH, ".//p[@class='test']").text

Upvotes: 5

p0deje
p0deje

Reputation: 4073

If you start an XPath expression with //, it begins searching from the root of document. To search relative to a particular element, you should prepend the expression with . instead:

element2 = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@title='div2']")
element2.find_element_by_xpath(".//p[@class='test']").text

Upvotes: 198

user3487861
user3487861

Reputation: 350

Use the following:

element2 = driver.find_element_by_cssselector("css=div[title='div2']")
element2.find_element_by_cssselector("p[@class='test']").text

Please let me know if you have any problems.

Upvotes: 8

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