In my previous post I have explained how to get HTML code for particular web element and view the tags, attributes and values.In this tutorial we will learn that how to write xpath to uniquely identify web elements so that we can perform actions like click , type and double click on them.
Xpath is w3c recommendation which is used to traverse XML document by using path expression. We are going go see simple examples of writing Xpath which will be useful for us in writing selenium automation test cases.
If you observe the HTML code then you will notice that for each tag there are attributes and values for it. We need to use these attributes and values to write our xpath. HTML tags are like <div>, <input >, <a>, <span> etc. The attributes are like id, class,href,text etc. And each attribute will have value.So using this we can create our own combination of Xpaths.
Video Tutorial -
I will tell you most commonly used syntax in writing xpath.
// - to refer Node/Tag
@ - to refer attribute
' ' - to specify value
If you know these 3 then half of your work is done.
Let us see some examples of Xpath
1. //input[@class='cname']
2. //span[@text='textvalue']
3. //div[@class='classvalue'][contains(@onclick,'text value')]
4. //div[contains(@class ,'cname') and text()='Hello Text']
These are few sample examples which are pretty much self explanatory. If you know the tag name, attribute and value then you can use them to write your xpath as shown the above example. If you have any doubts or suggestions feel free to drop a comment.
