CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptseleniumselenium-webdriverweb-scrapingselenium-chromedriver
Vlad Romila
Vlad Romila

Reputation: 203

Selenium xpath issue

I am having a very strange issue using selenium and xpath. I am having a page that renders 25 <a>'s with nested <img/> tags. I need to get using findElements() all this elements. If i get the page source and search trough the text the following substring: "alt="Expand List"" i get 25 appearances. But when i execute the command let items = await driver.findElements(By.xpath("//a[//img[contains(@alt,'Expand List')]]")) I get 32 items. I logged the items in google chrome and to the list are added <a>'s that contain images with different alt values. Any ideas? The piece of code:

    let text = await driver.getPageSource();
    var count = (text.match(/alt="Expand List"/g) || []).length;
    let items = await driver.findElements(By.xpath("//a[//img[contains(@alt,'Expand List')]]"))
    console.log(count, items.length); //outputs 25, 32

enter image description here And this image with the alt Collapse List appears in a <a>

enter image description here

Upvotes: 0

Views: 71

Answers (1)

scilence
scilence

Reputation: 1115

Your xpath should be more like:

//a/img[contains(@alt,'Expand List')]

One slash indicates it's a child of the parent //a.

I highly recommend getting a brower addon to test xpaths. One that I use almost everyday is ChroPath. You can also test xpaths in the devtools console with something like 

$x('//a/img[contains(@alt,'Expand List')]')

Will give output like this:

XPath in Devtools console

Upvotes: 1

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