CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xsltseleniumxpathselenium-webdriver
J_Coder
J_Coder

Reputation: 737

Difference between ancestor and ancestor-or-self

I know about ancestor in xpath but what is this ancestor-or-self. when we have to use ancestor-or-self.Please give me any examples.

Upvotes: 7

Views: 15605

Answers (2)

Manu
Manu

Reputation: 2291

Ancestor and Ancestor-or-self are the XPath Axes. An axis is a node-set relative to the current node.

The ancestor axis selects all the ancestors, i.e. parent, grandparent, etc of the current node whereas the ancestor-or-self selects all the ancestors, i.e. parent, grandparent, etc. of the current node and the current node itself.

Ancestor-or-self is generally used to locate the XML document tags or in XSLT that is a transformation language for XML designed to transform structured documents into other formats (such as XML, HTML, and plain text).

I believe that you may not need these axes to find the XPath in Selenium Webdriver as it deal with HTML tags not the XML tags and there are many other XPath axes that may help in finding the elements.

Upvotes: 2

har07
har07

Reputation: 89285

The axis name is quite self-explanatory I think. ancestor axis selects only ancestor(s) of current context element, while ancestor-or-self selects both ancestor(s) and the current element itself. Consider the following XML for example :

<root>
    <item key="a">
        <item key="b" target="true">
            <context key="c" target="true"/>
        </item>
    </item>
</root>

The following xpath which uses ancestor axis, will find the item b because it has target attribute equals true and b is ancestor of context element. But the XPath won't select context element itself, despite it has target equals true :

//context/ancestor::*[@target='true']

output of the above XPath in xpath tester :

Element='<item key="b" target="true">
  <context key="c" target="true" />
</item>'

contrasts with ancestor-or-self axis which will return the same, plus context element :

//context/ancestor-or-self::*[@target='true']

output of the 2nd XPath :

Element='<item key="b" target="true">
  <context key="c" target="true" />
</item>'
Element='<context key="c" target="true" />'

Upvotes: 14

Related Questions