How to get all descendants of an element using webdriver?

We can get all descendants of an element with Selenium webdriver. First of all we need to identify the parent element with help of any of the locators like id, class, name, xpath or css. Then we have to identify the descendants with the findElements(By.xpath()) method.

We can find the descendants from the parent element, by localizing it with the parent and then passing ( .//*) as a parameter to the findElements(By.xpath())

Syntax

element.findElements(By.xpath(".//*"))

Let us identify the tagname of the descendants of ul element in below html code−

Example

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

public class DescendantElements{
   public static void main(String[] args) {
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","C:\Users\ghs6kor\Desktop\Java\chromedriver.exe");
      WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
      driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
      driver.get("https://www.tutorialspoint.com/about/about_careers.htm");
      // identify element
      WebElement p=driver.findElement(By.xpath("//ul[@class='toc chapters']"));
      //identify descendants with .//* expression in xpath
      List d = p.findElements(By.xpath(".//*"));
      // iterate descendants
      for ( WebElement j : d ) {
         //getTagName() to descendant tags
         System.out.println(j.getTagName());
      }
      driver.close();
   }
}

Output