Question

I am using the following code to access a link (for phpunit/selenium):

//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/a[.='delete']

using an XPath checker in FireFox it returns 7 elements (because there are 7 links matching “test title 2”), but when I add [1] at the end:

//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/a[.='delete'][1]

it still returns 7 links. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

When you add [1] in the end of your expression, you select the first a child of each ...td[3] (i.e. 7 a child nodes). You can change your query to:

xpath=(//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/a[.='delete'])[1]

or in case you use webdriver (xpath prefix is not needed):

(//td[normalize-space() ='Test title 2']/following-sibling::td[3]/a[.='delete'])[1]

This will select the first a from the entire set of a children of ...td[3] elements.

Refer to XPath Examples for more tutorials.