Find next sibling of any given element with Selenium WebDriver

Question

I'm trying to create a method that given a WebElement finds and returns the very next element. I have found a lot of examples for what should work using XPath with "following" or "following-sibling" but I can't get it to work. For the purpose of the question here I will show the html, but the element types are irrelevant for what I need as I want a generic method that given any element of any type (a/ul/div/whatever) it will return the next sibling regardless of type.

<a id="blah" href="#" class="stuff">"My Label"</a>
<ul class="some-class">
    <li>...</li>
    <li>...</li>
</ul>

My buggy debugging code:

IWebElement element = driver.FindElement(By.Id("blah"));
IWebElement nextElement = element.FindElement(By.XPath("//following-sibling::ul[@class='some-class']"));

I suspect my xpath syntax is wrong... and I am frankly clueless. Does the "//" mean relative to element or to the DOM itself? Is there a way of doing this without knowing what the tag of the next element is? I would like to just get the next element no matter what type it is. I'd just like to figure out the simplest and most generic way to do this. What I would like to have:

public IWebElement NextSibling(IWebElement element) 
{
    IWebElement nextSibling = element.FindElement(By.?("magical string to find next sibling"));
    return nextSibling;
}

...which is exactly what you can already do in javascript with element.nextSibling()

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 17 '17 at 21:09

4

Try with .// in your xpath because that is relative path, you were using absolute path so it's not working as you expected.

answered Jan 17 '17 at 21:09

acikojevic

915
1
7
16

Thank you! I usually don't use xpath. This gets me past the first part of the problem. – jibbs Jan 17 '17 at 21:23
Post your solution here even if you fail so we could help you solve this. :) – acikojevic Jan 17 '17 at 21:51
Perfect~! Thanks, it helped me. – Lin Aug 10 '18 at 13:06

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '17 at 22:42

2

In xpath you wouldn't need the double slash, which actually means any decendants of the current context (which is not what you want). You can specify the current context by doing nothing i.e.

following-sibling::ul[@class='some-class']

answered Jan 17 '17 at 22:42

VilladsR

350
2
10

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

The best, and possibly only, solution I see is to just use javascript (element.nextSibling;) as I mentioned in the end of my question. I never even considered that I could use IJavaScriptExecutor to return an IWebElement until I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11320472/2246511

Again, I do not want to have to provide anything about the sibling like what type it is or class or anything. The js nextSibling is exactly what I want.

score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 03 '19 at 09:11

-1

If you work with label, attribute "for" link to input "id". So, you can try this:

string nextElementId = driver.FindElement(By.Id("blah")).GetAttribute("for");
IWebElement nextElement = driver.FindElement(By.Id(nextElementId));

answered Apr 03 '19 at 09:11

Антон Вайцеховский

37
4

Find next sibling of any given element with Selenium WebDriver

4 Answers4

Linked