A Comprehensive Guide to Deal with XPath in Selenium

XPath is one of the most preferable locators provided by Selenium. XPath is a standard strategy supported by Selenium to locate web elements. It provides the path expression to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document. XPath is defined as an XML path that helps to query the XML documents.

XPath is one of the most preferable locators provided by Selenium. XPath is a standard strategy supported by Selenium to locate web elements. It provides the path expression to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document. XPath is defined as an XML path that helps to query the XML documents.

Selenium has always been the first choice for automation developers to automate their web applications. Locating dynamic web elements has historically been dolorous for automation testers, which brings the scope of XPath into the picture.

XPath is one of the most preferable locators provided by Selenium. Locators are Selenium commands used to locate a GUI web element present in the web page Document Object Model (DOM) structure. Below are few locators supported by Selenium to locate web elements:

• ID
• XPath
• Name
• Class Name
• CSS Selector
• Linktext
• Partial Linktext
• Tag Name
• DOM Locator

Though ID and CSS locators are said to be the best and fast locators. However, it is sometimes difficult to locate a web element even with ID, Name, and CSS; in such case, different methods of XPath in selenium play a vital role in locating the dynamic element.

In this article, we would be more focusing on how to deal with dynamic XPath’s. Dynamic XPath is also known as Custom XPath. Before moving ahead, let’s have a quick look at the definition of XPath and the different types of XPath in selenium.

What is XPath in Selenium?

XPath is a standard strategy supported by Selenium to locate web elements. It provides the path expression to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document. XPath is defined as an XML path that helps to query the XML documents.

General syntax of XPath: //Tagname[@AttibuteName = ‘value’]

The above syntax defines four components:

1. Double forward-slash (//): Denote the current node.
2. Tagname: Defines the tag name for the element to be located.
3. AttributeName: Defines an attribute of the tag defined at the starting of the XPath.
4. Value: Represents the value of an attribute defined.

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