Question

I have an element in my code that’s used on many pages in many places. Specifically, it’s a calendar element. This element contains many parts, however, these internal parts are always the same no matter where it’s used. What I would like to do is search for something internal to the calendar element regardless of where the calendar element is.

Just as a simplified case, consider the following:

<div class="not-calendar">
    <a href="/not-calendar-link">A Link</a>
</div>
<div class="calendar">
    <a href="/calendar-link">A Link</a>
</div>

Now, I would like to do something along the lines of:

$this->click("//a[text()='A Link']");

But this is ambiguous. I would like to do that same kind of “search” for the A Link text, but only search for such within the div with the class calendar. Keeping in mind that I don’t want a direct XPath to the calendar div because I’m expecting it to show up in different places on many pages. How might I go about doing this? Thank you much!

Answer 1

Xpath is quite powerfull, have you tried to check the documentation?

//bbb      Selects all bbb elements no matter where they are in the document
aaa/bbb    Selects all bbb elements that are children of aaa
aaa//bbb   Selects all bbb elements that are descendant of the aaa element, no matter where they are under the aaa element

The expression you’re looking for: //div[@class='calendar']/a