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Need to find element in selenium by css

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in DevOps and Agile by (19.7k points)

I want to find the element of this link "us states" in <h5>. I am trying this in craigslist. Any help will be highly appreciated

Here is the url: http://auburn.craigslist.org/

<html class="">

<head>

<body class="homepage w1024 list">

    <script type="text/javascript">

    <article id="pagecontainer">

            <section class="body">

        <table id="container" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" 

    <tbody>

           <tr>

    <td id="leftbar">

    <td id="center">

    <td id="rightbar">

        <ul class="menu collapsible">

            <li class="expand s">

            <li class="s">

            <li class="s">

                <h5 class="ban hot">us states</h5>

                <ul class="acitem" style="display: none;">

            </li>

        <li class="s">

        <li class="s">

1 Answer

0 votes
by (62.9k points)

Only using class names is not sufficient in your case.

By.cssSelector(".ban") has 15 matching nodes

By.cssSelector(".hot") has 11 matching nodes

By.cssSelector(".ban.hot") has 5 matching nodes

Therefore you need more restrictions to narrow it down. Options 1 and 2 below are available for CSS selector, 1 might be the one that suits your needs best.

Option 1: Using list items' index (CssSelector or XPath)

Limitations

  • Not stable enough if the site's structure changes

Example:

 driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("#rightbar > .menu > li:nth-of-type(3) > h5"));

driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//*[@id='rightbar']/ul/li[3]/h5"));

Option 2: Using Selenium's FindElements, then index them. (CssSelector or XPath)

Limitations

  • Not stable enough if the site's structure changes

  • Not the native selector's way

Example:

// note that By.CssSelector(".ban.hot") and //*[contains(@class, 'ban hot')] are different, but doesn't matter in your case

IList<IWebElement> hotBanners = driver.FindElements(By.CssSelector(".ban.hot"));

IWebElement banUsStates = hotBanners[3];

Option 3: Using text (XPath only)

Limitations

  • Not for multi-lingual sites

  • Only for XPath, not for Selenium's CssSelector

Example: 

driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//h5[contains(@class, 'ban hot') and text() = 'us states']"));

Option 4: Index the grouped selector (XPath only)

Limitations

  • Not stable enough if the site's structure changes

  • Only for XPath, not CssSelector

Example:

driver.FindElement(By.XPath("(//h5[contains(@class, 'ban hot')])[3]"));

Option 5: Find the hidden list items link by href, then traverse back to h5 (XPath only)

Limitations

  • Only for XPath, not CssSelector

  • Low performance

  • Tricky XPath

Example:

driver.FindElement(By.XPath(".//li[.//ul/li/a[contains(@href, 'geo.craigslist.org/iso/us/al')]]/h5"));

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