Why I must search explicitly relative elements in Selenium by xpath?

Question

I'm trying to look for elements by xpath with Selenium's WebDriver:

WebElement element1 = driver.findElement(By.id("someID"));
List<WebElement> xPathElements = element1.findElements((By.xpath("//span[@class='someClass']")));

With this code, I'm getting all the elements with class='someClass' in the DOM.

Only when I add "." at the beginning of the xpath string I get all the elements with class='someClass' that are under element1

element1.findElements((By.xpath(".//span[@class='someClass']")));

What's the sense here? I called findElements from element1 so by default it should search for elements that are under element1 , Why I must add the "."?

Answer 1

It has got nothing to do with Selenium, it is the way xpath works.

If you have something like //elem xpath will located anywhere in the document. But if you want to search for an element relative to another element or rather a descendant then you have to use a '.' or a dot like .//elem.

Answer 2

. - select current node

// - Selects nodes in the document from the current node that match the selection no matter where they are. As current node not specified, will search everywhere.

So .// means search everywhere inside current node.

In your case:

//span[@class='someClass'] is //span[@class='someClass']

.//span[@class='someClass'] is element1//span[@class='someClass']

See - xpath syntax