How to find an element using the “XPath” in Selenium?

We can find an element using the xpath locator with Selenium webdriver.

To identify the element with xpath, the expression should be //tagname[@attribute='value'].

To identify the element with xpath, the expression should be //tagname[@class='value']. There can be two types of xpath – relative and absolute. The absolute xpath begins with / symbol and starts from the root node upto the element that we want to identify.

For example,

/html/body/div[1]/div/div[1]/a

The relative xpath begins with // symbol and does not start from the root node. For example,

//img[@alt='tutorialspoint']

Let us see the html code of the highlighted element starting from the root.

The absolute xpath for the element Home is /html/body/div[1]/div/div[1]/a.

The relative xpath for element Home is //a[@title='TutorialsPoint - Home'].

There are also functions available which help to frame relative xpath expressions −

• text() – It is used to identify an element with the help of the visible text on the page. The xpath expression is //*[text()='Home'].

• starts-with – It is used to identify an element whose attribute value begins with a specific text. This function is normally used for attributes whose value changes on each page load.

Let us see the html of the element Q/A −

The xpath expression should be //a[starts-with(@title, 'Questions &')].

• contains() - it identifies an element whose attribute value contains a sub-text of the actual attribute value. This function is normally used for attributes whose value changes on each page load.

The xpath expression is : //a[contains(@title, 'Questions & Answers')].

Syntax

WebElement m = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[@class = 'cat-title']"));

Example

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
public class LocatorXpath{
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver",
         "C:\Users\ghs6kor\Desktop\Java\geckodriver.exe");
      WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
      //implicit wait
      driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
      //URL launch
      driver.get("https://www.tutorialspoint.com/online_dev_tools.htm");
      // identify element with xpath
      WebElement n=driver.
      findElement(By.xpath("//span[@class = 'cat-title']"));
      String str = n.getText();
      System.out.println("Text is : " + str);
      driver.close();
   }
}

Output