Select parent element of known element in Selenium

Question

I have a certain element that I can select with Selenium 1   Unfortunately I need to click the parent element to get the desired behaviour  The element I can easily locate has attribute unselectable  making it dead for clicking  How do I navigate upwards with XPath

User · Answer

We can select the parent tag with the help of Selenium as follows:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//table[@id='abc']//div/nobr[.='abc']/../.."));

this will help you to find the grandparent of the known Element. Just Remove one (/..) to find the immediate Parent Element.

Like:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//table[@id='abc']//div/nobr[.='abc']/..));

There are some other ways to implement this, but it worked fine for me.

User · Answer

Let s consider your DOM as   lt a gt       lt  -- some other icons and texts -- gt       lt span gt Close lt  span gt   lt  a gt    Now that you need to select parent tag  a  based on  lt span gt  text  then use  driver findElement By xpath    a    span text    Close          Explanation  Select the node based on its child node s value

User · Answer

There are a couple of options there  The sample code is in Java  but a port to other languages should be straightforward  Java  WebElement myElement   driver findElement By id  quot myDiv quot     WebElement parent    WebElement    JavascriptExecutor  driver  executeScript                                      quot return arguments 0  parentNode  quot   myElement    XPath  WebElement myElement   driver findElement By id  quot myDiv quot     WebElement parent   myElement findElement By xpath  quot      quot      Obtaining the driver from the WebElement Note  As you can see  for the JavaScript version you ll need the driver  If you don t have direct access to it  you can retrieve it from the WebElement using  WebDriver driver     WrapsDriver  myElement  getWrappedDriver

User · Answer

Little more about XPath axes  Lets say we have below HTML structure    lt div class  third level ancestor  gt       lt nav class  second level ancestor  gt           lt div class  parent  gt               lt span gt Child lt  span gt           lt  div gt       lt  nav gt   lt  div gt       span parent    - returns any element which is direct parent     In this case output is  lt div class  parent  gt       span parent  div  class  parent   - returns parent element only of exact node type and only if specified predicate is True     Output   lt div class  parent  gt       span ancestor    - returns all ancestors  including parent      Output   lt div class  parent  gt    lt nav class  second level ancestor  gt    lt div class  third level ancestor  gt          span ancestor-or-self    - returns all ancestors and current element itself    Output   lt span gt Child lt  span gt    lt div class  parent  gt    lt nav class  second level ancestor  gt    lt div class  third level ancestor  gt         span ancestor  div 2  - returns second ancestor  starting from parent  of type div     Output   lt div class  third level ancestor  gt

User · Answer

This  might be useful for someone else  Using this sample html   lt div class  ParentDiv  gt       lt label for  label  gt labelName lt  label gt       lt input type  button  value  elementToSelect  gt   lt  div gt   lt div class  DontSelect  gt       lt label for  animal  gt pig lt  label gt       lt input type  button  value  elementToSelect  gt   lt  div gt    If for example  I want to select an element in the same section  e g div  as a label  you can use this     label contains     labelName    parent     input  value  elementToSelect      This just means  look for a label  it could anything like a  h2  called labelName  Navigate to the parent of that label  i e  div class  ParentDiv    Search within the descendants of that parent to find any child element with the value of elementToSelect  With this  it will not select the second elementToSelect with DontSelect div as parent   The trick is that you can reduce search areas for an element by navigating to the parent first and then searching descendant of that parent for the element you need  Other Syntax like following-sibling  h2 can also be used in some cases  This means the sibling following element h2  This will work for elements at the same level  having the same parent

User · Answer

You can do this by using  parent  node   in the xpath  Simply append   parent  node   to the child elements xpath    For example   Let xpath of child element is childElementXpath   Then xpath of its immediate ancestor would be childElementXpath parent  node     Xpath of its next ancestor would be childElementXpath parent  node   parent  node    and so on    Also  you can navigate to an ancestor of an element using   childElementXpath ancestor     attr  attr value     This would be useful when you have a known child element which is unique but has a parent element which cannot be uniquely identified

User · Answer

Take a look at the possible XPath axes  you are probably looking for parent  Depending on how you are finding the first element  you could just adjust the xpath for that   Alternatively you can try the double-dot syntax     which selects the parent of the current node

[select] Select parent element of known element in Selenium

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