Trouble generating the right Xpath

Question

My requirement is when I click on Facebook it should open the Facebook homepage. The xpath which I generated is //*[@class='sub2']/tbody/tr[2]/td/a but still it is giving me NoSuchElementException. Please help me out in generating the correct xPath.

<div> 
<center>
<table width="100%" class="sub2" style="float: none" border='8' 
cellspacing="8" cellpadding="8">
<tbody>
          <tr>
             <th>
               <center>Sample Program</center>
            </th>
         </tr>
         <tr>
         <td>
            <a href="https://facebook.com">
            <center> Facebook </center>
            </a>
         </td>
         </tr>
          <tr> </tr>
       </tbody>
  </table>
</center>

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 28 '20 at 10:34

1

You can use XPath's normalize-space() as in //a[normalize-space()="Facebook"]

answered Feb 28 '20 at 10:34

Udhav Sarvaiya

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 28 '20 at 06:28

0

You can fetch the element by using the xpath:

//a[@href='https://facebook.com']

answered Feb 28 '20 at 06:28

Sameer Arora

4,439
3
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I tried this option. It still gives me org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException. – SWAP Mar 02 '20 at 19:18

undetected Selenium · Answer 3 · 2020-02-28T06:44:54.423

0

To locate the element with text as Facebook you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using CssSelector:
```
"table td>a[href*='facebook']>center"
```

Using Xpath:

"//table//td/a/center[normalize-space()='Facebook']"

Reference

You can find a couple of detailed discussions on NoSuchElementException in:

edited Feb 28 '20 at 06:44

answered Feb 28 '20 at 06:39

undetected Selenium

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It is still giving me NoSuchElementException. – SWAP Mar 02 '20 at 19:17

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 28 '20 at 09:55

It seems that you have messed up absolute xpath with relative xpath. if you start by using // it means you are using relative xpath. // means it can search the element anywhere at the webpage. Since you are trying to find a tag with the text 'Facebook' you can try //a[contains(text(),"Facebook")] which means select an anchor tag within the whole DOM which contains the text "Facebook".

Or you can try //*[contains(text(),"Facebook")] if you are quite sure there are no other elements containing the text 'Facebook', since the above xpath means "select all elemnts in the DOM where it contains the text 'Facebook' ".

Trouble generating the right Xpath

4 Answers4

Reference