Indexing over the results returned by selenium

Question

Hi

I try to index over results returned by an xpath. For example:

xpath = '//a[@id="someID"]'

can return a few results. I want to get a list of them. I thought that doing:

numOfResults = sel.get_xpath_count(xpath)
l = []
for i in range(1,numOfResults+1):
   l.append(sel.get_text('(%s)[%d]'%(xpath, i)))

would work because doing something similar with firefox's Xpath checker works:

(//a[@id='someID'])[2]

returns the 2nd result.

Ideas why the behavior would be different and how to do such a thing with selenium Thanks

Answer 1

In Selenium you normally do it without the extra brackets so your loop would look like the following

numOfResults = sel.get_xpath_count(xpath)
l = []
for i in range(1,numOfResults+1):
   l.append(sel.get_text('%s[%d]'%(xpath, i)))

And that will produce a valid XPath in Selenium like //a[@id='someID'][2]

Answer 2

Can you try the xpath /html/descendant::a[@id="someID"] You can replace the /html with something else that is an ancestor of your links like id('content'). You should then be able to locate individual links using [1], [2] etc.

From the XPath TR at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#path-abbrev:

NOTE: The location path //para[1] does not mean the same as the location path /descendant::para[1]. The latter selects the first descendant para element; the former selects all descendant para elements that are the first para children of their parents.

Answer 3

The answer is that you need to tell selenium that you're using xpath:

numOfResults = sel.get_xpath_count(xpath)
l = []
for i in range(1,numOfResults+1):
   l.append(sel.get_text(xpath='(%s)[%d]'%(xpath, i)))