Finding XPath for text in div following input

Question

I got an issue reading XPath. Need some help/advise from experts.

Part of my HTML is below:

<div class = "input required_field">
    <div class="rounded_corner_error">
        <input id="FnameInput" class="ideField" type="text" value="" name="first_name>
           <div class ="help-tooltip">LOGIN BACK TO MAIN</div>
           <div class="error-tooltip">

I need to find the XPath of the text message (LOGIN BACK TO MAIN)

Using Firebug I find the XPath

("//html/body/div/div[5]/div/div/form/fieldset/div/div[2]/div[2]/div/div");

But using above XPath I can read only class = help-tooltip but I need to read LOGIN BACK TO MAIN.

The HTML you have posted is invalid (the `name` attribute of the `input` element is unclosed). You have also indented the last two `divs` as though they are children of the `input`, but that would be invalid HTML and is probably not representative of your structure. If you are feeding HTML (which is not valid XML) to a system that is only XML-aware, you may have problems. — Phrogz, Jun 03 '13 at 03:38

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 02 '13 at 09:17

3

Try adding /text() on the end of the xpath you have.

answered Jun 02 '13 at 09:17

Matthew Strawbridge

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score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

3

It does not really look like your XPath matches your XHTML element.

You should try something simpler and more generic, such as:

//div[@class="help-tooltip"]/text()

See Selecting a css class with xpath.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

Community

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answered Jun 02 '13 at 09:25

Martin Prikryl

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Phrogz · Answer 3 · 2013-06-03T03:37:11.000

I would use:

# Selecting the div element
//input[@id="FnameInput"]/following-sibling::div[@class="help-tooltip"]

# Selecting the text content of the div
//input[@id="FnameInput"]/following-sibling::div[@class="help-tooltip"]/text()

…since a syntactically-valid HTML document will have a unique id attribute, and as such that's a pretty strong anchor point.

Note that the latter expression will select the text node, not the text string content of that node; you need to extract the value of the text node if you want the string. How you do that depends on what tools you are using:

In JavaScript/DOM that would be the .nodeValue property of the text node.
For Nokogiri that would be the .content method.
…but I have no idea what technology you are using your XPath with.

Finding XPath for text in div following input

3 Answers3