Locating child nodes of WebElements in selenium

Question

I am using selenium to test my web application and I can successfully find tags using By.xpath. However now and then I need to find child nodes within that node.

Example:

<div id="a">

    <div>

        <span />

        <input />

    </div>

</div>

I can do:

WebElement divA = driver.findElement( By.xpath( "//div[@id='a']"))

But now I need to find the input, so I could do:

driver.findElement( By.xpath( "//div[@id='a']//input" ) )

However, at that point in code I only have divA, not its xpath anymore... I would like to do something like this:

WebElement input = driver.findElement( divA, By.xpath( "//input" ) );

But such a function does not exist. Can I do this anyhow?

BTW: Sometimes I need to find a <div> that has a certain descendent node. How can I ask in xpath for "the <div> that contains a <span> with the text "hello world'"?

Answer 1

The following command can be used in this scenario:

WebElement input = div1.findElement(By.xpath(".//input"));

If you are interested to learn Selenium on a much deeper level and want to become a professional in the testing domain, check out Intellipaat’s online automation testing training!