XPath : finding an attribute node (and only one) - xpath

What is the XPath to find only ONE node (whichever) having a certain attribute (actually I'm interested in the attribute, not the node). For example, in my XML, I have several tags having a lang attribute. I know all of them must have the same value. I just want to get any of them.
Right now, I do this : //*[1][#lang]/#lang, but it seems not to work properly, for an unknown reason.
My tries have led me to things ranging from concatenation of all the #lang values ('en en en en...') to nothing, with sometimes inbetween what I want but not on all XML.
EDIT :
Actually //#lang[1] can not work, because the function position() is called before the test on a lang attribute presence. So it always takes the very first element found in the XML. It worked best at the time because many many times, the lang attribute was on root element.

After some more tackling, here is a working solution :
(//#lang)[1]
Parentheses are needed to separate the [1] from the attribute name, otherwise the position() function is applied within the parent element of the attribute (which is useless since there can be only one attribute of a certain name within a tag : that's why //#lang[2] always selects nothing).

Did you tried this?
//#lang[1]
here you can see an example.

The following XPath seems to do what you want:
//*[#lang][1]/attribute::lang

Related

Is it possible to use Following and preceding in combination in Selenium?

On this page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Seven#Episode_list
I have:
//*[text()='Reception']//preceding::th[contains(#id, 'ep')]//following::I
But it only registers following.
The default firepath selector is: .//*[#id='mw-content-text']/div/table[5]/tbody/tr/td[1]/I but this kind of selector is known to break quite frequently. Just wondering if there is a better way of doing this and I thought this might be a way.
Thanks!
:)
- You can see that it's getting stuff under the table which is not what I want :S
Try to use below XPath to match required elements:
//th[contains(#id, 'ep')]/following::I[./following::*[text()='Reception']]
This looks more simple
//tr[contains(#class, 'vevent')]//i
Don't overcomplicate things. You need I tag inside each row. So just find row locator tr[contains(#class, 'vevent')] and get it's I
Another good approach in case you want to check that inside of parent element is located some special element, but you want to find some 3rd element is to use such style: //element[./specific]//child , so in your case:
//tr[contains(#class, 'vevent')][./th[contains(#id,'ep')]]//i
so it's I tag inside row that contains #id,'ep' in header

getting attribute via xpath query succesfull in browser, but not in Robot Framework

I have a certain XPATH-query which I use to get the height from a certain HTML-element which returns me perfectly the desired value when I execute it in Chrome via the XPath Helper-plugin.
//*/div[#class="BarChart"]/*[name()="svg"]/*[name()="svg"]/*[name()="g"]/*[name()="rect" and #class="bar bar1"]/#height
However, when I use the same query via the Get Element Attribute-keyword in the Robot Framework
Get Element Attribute//*/div[#class="BarChart"]/*[name()="svg"]/*[name()="svg"]/*[name()="g"]/*[name()="rect" and #class="bar bar1"]/#height
... then I got an InvalidSelectorException about this XPATH.
InvalidSelectorException: Message: u'invalid selector: Unable to locate an
element with the xpath expression `//*/div[#class="BarChart"]/*[name()="svg"]/*
[name()="svg"]/*[name()="g"]/*[name()="rect" and #class="bar bar1"]/`
So, the Robot Framework or Selenium removed the #-sign and everything after it. I thought it was an escape -problem and added and removed some slashes before the #height, but unsuccessful. I also tried to encapsulate the result of this query in the string()-command but this was also unsuccessful.
Does somebody has an idea to prevent my XPATH-query from getting broken?
It looks like you can't include the attribute axis in the XPath itself when you're using Robot. You need to retrieve the element by XPath, and then specify the attribute name outside that. It seems like the syntax is something like this:
Get Element Attribute xpath=(//*/div[#class="BarChart"]/*[name()="svg"]/*[name()="svg"]/*[name()="g"]/*[name()="rect" and #class="bar bar1"])#height
or perhaps (I've never used Robot):
Get Element Attribute xpath=(//*/div[#class="BarChart"]/*[name()="svg"]/*[name()="svg"]/*[name()="g"]/*[name()="rect" and #class="bar bar1"])[1]#height
This documentation says
attribute_locator consists of element locator followed by an # sign and attribute name, for example "element_id#class".
so I think what I've posted above is on the right track.
You are correct in your observation that the keyword seems to removes everything after the final #. More correctly, it uses the # to separate the element locator from the attribute name, and does this by splitting the string at that final # character.
No amount of escaping will solve the problem as the code isn't doing any parsing at this point. This is the exact code (as of this writing...) that performs that operation:
def _parse_attribute_locator(self, attribute_locator):
parts = attribute_locator.rpartition('#')
...
The simple solution is to drop that trailing slash, so your xpath will look like this:
//*/div[#class="BarChart"]/... and #class="bar bar1"]#height`

Retrieve an xpath text contains using text()

I've been hacking away at this one for hours and I just can't figure it out. Using XPath to find text values is tricky and this problem has too many moving parts.
I have a webpage with a large table and a section in this table contains a list of users (assignees) that are assigned to a particular unit. There is nearly always multiple users assigned to a unit and I need to make sure a particular user is assigned to any of the units on the table. I've used XPath for nearly all of my selectors and I'm half way there on this one. I just can't seem to figure out how to use contains with text() in this context.
Here's what I have so far:
//td[#id='unit']/span [text()='asdfasdfasdfasdfasdf (Primary); asdfasdfasdfasdfasdf, asdfasdfasdfasdf; 456, 3456'; testuser]
The XPath Query above captures all text in the particular section I am looking at, which is great. However, I only need to know if testuser is in that section.
text() gets you a set of text nodes. I tend to use it more in a context of //span//text() or something.
If you are trying to check if the text inside an element contains something you should use contains on the element rather than the result of text() like this:
span[contains(., 'testuser')]
XPath is pretty good with context. If you know exactly what text a node should have you can do:
span[.='full text in this span']
But if you want to do something like regular expressions (using exslt for example) you'll need to use the string() function:
span[regexp:test(string(.), 'testuser')]

XPath: How to select node with some attribute by index?

I have several nodes with some particular attribute and I need to select one of them by index. For example I need to select second <div> with 'test' class - //div[#class='test'][2] doesn't work.
Is there a way to select node with some attribute by index ? How to do it?
This is a FAQ.
In XPath the [] operator has a higher precedence (binds stronger) than the // pseudo-operator.
Because of this, the expression:
//div[#class='test'][2]
selects all div elements whose class attribute is "test" and who (the div elements) are the second such div child of their parent. This is not what you want.
Use:
(//div[#class='test'])[2]
I believe per XML specification, attributes are not considered to have an order.
Note that the order of attribute specifications in a start-tag or empty-element tag is not significant.
See here
I think you'd be best of re-factoring your structure such that attribute order does not describe anything. If you can give any more details we might be able to offer suggestions.
EDIT: Re-reading your post, looks like you are trying to find node order and not attribute order. Node order is allowed and your syntax looks OK off-hand. What software are you doing this in?

Can't get nth node in Selenium

I try to write xpath expressions so that my tests won't be broken by small design changes. So instead of the expressions that Selenium IDE generates, I write my own.
Here's an issue:
//input[#name='question'][7]
This expression doesn't work at all. Input nodes named 'question' are spread across the page. They're not siblings.
I've tried using intermediate expression, but it also fails.
(//input[#name='question'])[2]
error = Error: Element (//input[#name='question'])[2] not found
That's why I suppose Seleniun has a wrong implementation of XPath.
According to XPath docs, the position predicate must filter by the position in the nodeset, so it must find the seventh input with the name 'question'. In Selenium this doesn't work. CSS selectors (:nth-of-kind) neither.
I had to write an expression that filters their common parents:
//*[contains(#class, 'question_section')][7]//input[#name='question']
Is this a Selenium specific issue, or I'm reading the specs wrong way? What can I do to make a shorter expression?
Here's an issue:
//input[#name='question'][7]
This expression doesn't work at all.
This is a FAQ.
[] has a higher priority than //.
The above expression selects every input element with #name = 'question', which is the 7th child of its parent -- and aparently the parents of input elements in the document that is not shown don't have so many input children.
Use (note the brackets):
(//input[#name='question'])[7]
This selects the 7th element input in the document that satisfies the conditions in the predicate.
Edit:
People, who know Selenium (Dave Hunt) suggest that the above expression is written in Selenium as:
xpath=(//input[#name='question'])[7]
If you want the 7th input with name attribute with a value of question in the source then try the following:
/descendant::input[#name='question'][7]

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