CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlseleniumxpath
JensOlsen112
JensOlsen112

Reputation: 1299

Selenium cannot find Xpath when "xmlns" attribute is included

Basically I'm trying to process the following HTML using the Xpath of Selenium:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<a>Public Profile</a>
</html>

I'm using the following selector:

//a[text() = 'Public Profile']

Seems simple enough, however, according to Selenium it returns 0 matches. I have tried in the online xpath tester as well:

http://codebeautify.org/Xpath-Tester

and it doesn't return any results neither. The strange thing is that when I remove the

xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

-attribute it finds the match without a problem.

Can anyone explain to me why the xmlns tag makes the Xpath query fail?

On a sidenote, my C# selenium-xpath query looks the following:

Driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//a[text() = 'Public Profile']"))

EDIT: A link I found which explains what's going on nicely:

XML element has namespace, my XPATH does not work

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3319

Answers (1)

sideshowbarker
sideshowbarker

Reputation: 88066

As far as XML/XPath processing goes, the xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" part puts the html element into an XML namespace.

And the a element inherits that namespace. And the //a[text() = 'Public Profile'] XPath expression will only match an un-namespaced a element.

//a[namespace-uri()='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'][text() = 'Public Profile'] is one way to make it match.

//*[name()='a'][text() = 'Public Profile'] is another way.

And //*[text() = 'Public Profile'] is yet another way (assuming you already know that’ll get the a element you want, and not some other element).

Upvotes: 3

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