xPath适用于最后一页，但不适用于第一页-Selenium Java

Question

I want to extract some data from NCBI using Selenium in Java

The problem is that the xPath /html/body/div[2]/div[1]/form/div[1]/div[5]/div/div[5]/div[" + i + "]/div[2]/p/a to get every article's title on the page and click on them, works for the last page but not for the first page and I couldn't understand why.

driver.findElement(By.xpath("/html/body/div[2]/div[1]/form/div[1]/div[5]/div/div[5]/div[" + i + "]/div[2]/p/a")).click();

Answer 1

I suspect this is an off-by-one error as XPath's indexing starts with 1 and having div[0] there would not match anything.

In general, though, your expression is very fragile as it is an absolute expression with the path starting with the very root of the HTML tree down to the desired element going through every parent. Any minor layout change would break it.

Instead, we could seriously simplify the expression:

//div[contains(@class, 'rslt')]/p/a

this would match all 20 links per page.

Or, if you prefer more concise CSS selectors:

driver.findElements(By.cssSelector(".rslt > p > a"));