How to find an element with respect to its parent element with Selenium and Python

Question

I am trying to scrape a website, but I need to search for an element whose parent is like this:

//div[@title="parent"]

People are talking about getting an element from its child. Is there a way to reverse it and find the child from its parent?

I want the /span with @title = "child" whose parent is //div[@title = "Search results."]

DonnyFlaw · Accepted Answer · 2022-07-07T17:29:08.167

3

You can try to use

//div[parent::div[@title="parent"]]

or simply

//div[@title="parent"]/div

In Python code you can also use

parent = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//div[@title="parent"]')
child = parent.find_element(By.XPATH, './div')

edited Jul 07 '22 at 17:29

answered Jul 07 '22 at 17:21

DonnyFlaw

Is this supposed to give me all the elements whose parent is this ? – Omar Yacop Jul 07 '22 at 17:22
@OmarYacop yes. Do you need a specific node? – DonnyFlaw Jul 07 '22 at 17:23
@OmarYacop then `'//div[parent::div[@title="parent"]]'` should work – DonnyFlaw Jul 07 '22 at 17:27
I want the /span with @title = "child" whose parent is //div[@title = "Search results."] – Omar Yacop Jul 07 '22 at 17:28
@OmarYacop `//span[@title='child' and parent::div[@title='parent']]` – DonnyFlaw Jul 07 '22 at 17:30

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 07 '22 at 17:33

To locate the child element:

<span title="child"...>

within it's parent:

<div title="Search results."...>

you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using css_selector:

element = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div[title='Search results.'] span[title='child']")

Using xpath:

element = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//div[@title='Search results.']//span[@title='child']")

2 Answers2