Question

I am using selenium to test my webapp with chromedriver however selenium doesn’t seem able to find the element which I want.

The html I am querying is:

<table>
   <thead><thead>
   <tbody>
     <tr>
       <td></td>
       <td>
          <span class="class1">
            <span>Test text</span>
          </span>
          <ul>
            <li class="class2"><a href="#">Edit</a></li>
            <li class="class2"><a href="#">Remove</a></li>
         </ul>
       </td>
     </tr>
   </tbody>
</table>

I am trying to select the web element:

<a href="#">Edit</a>

I have tried the following using CSS selectors:

table > tbody > tr:first-child > td:nth-child(2) > ul > li:first-child > a

and the same sort of query using XPath:

//table/tbody/tr/td/following-sibling::td[1]/ul/li/a

When I debug this and use a quickwatch to dynamically modify the query both queries work up until I try and select the ul; for example:

table > tbody > tr:first-child > td:nth-child(2)

AND

//table/tbody/tr/td/following-sibling::td[1]

Both correctly select the contents of the correct td containing the ul. When I try to make either of them get the ul, each of the selections becomes null.

So I have two problems, why am I not able to select the ul element using either CSS selectors or XPath and is there another technique I can use to select the first tag in the list with text “Edit”.

Cheers

Answer 1

Not really sure why your selector would break after you add ul, but try this CSS selector as an alternative:

table > tbody > tr:first-child > td:nth-child(2) li.class2:first-child > a

Or this equivalent XPath expression:

//table/tbody/tr/td[2]//li[@class="class2"][1]/a