如何使用xpath查找带有可选子元素的元素？

Question

I'm using Selenium with xpath to get certain elements. I have a html page with the following elements:

<td>A</td>
<td><em>B</em></td>

I've tried using the following xpath expression to find td elements:

//td[contains(text(), 'A')] 
//td[contains(text(), 'B')]

The expression finds <td>A</td> but not <td><em>B</em></td>

How can I write an xpath expression which finds td tags with both no sub element and one or more sub elements?

Answer 1

Try this instead

//td[contains(., 'A')]
//td[contains(., 'B')]

This will return the td tags. The difference between . and text() you can refer here - XPath: difference between dot and text() .

Answer 2

You need to understand the difference between Testing text() nodes vs string values in XPath .

Here, you want to test the string value of td :

//td[. = 'B']

That way, both

<td>B</td>

and

<td><em>B</em></td>

will be selected, regardless of the em .

Answer 3

You can use ancestor to get the first <td> tag

//*[contains(text(), 'A')]/ancestor::td[1]
//*[contains(text(), 'B')]/ancestor::td[1]

And in general use

String text = "A";
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[contains(text(), '" + text + "')]/ancestor::td[1]"));