Selenium xpath issue

Question

I am having a very strange issue using selenium and xpath. I am having a page that renders 25 <a> 's with nested <img/> tags. I need to get using findElements() all this elements. If i get the page source and search trough the text the following substring: "alt="Expand List"" i get 25 appearances. But when i execute the command let items = await driver.findElements(By.xpath("//a[//img[contains(@alt,'Expand List')]]")) I get 32 items. I logged the items in google chrome and to the list are added <a> 's that contain images with different alt values. Any ideas? The piece of code:

    let text = await driver.getPageSource();
    var count = (text.match(/alt="Expand List"/g) || []).length;
    let items = await driver.findElements(By.xpath("//a[//img[contains(@alt,'Expand List')]]"))
    console.log(count, items.length); //outputs 25, 32

And this image with the alt Collapse List appears in a <a>

Answer 1

Your xpath should be more like:

//a/img[contains(@alt,'Expand List')]

One slash indicates it's a child of the parent //a .

I highly recommend getting a brower addon to test xpaths. One that I use almost everyday is ChroPath. You can also test xpaths in the devtools console with something like

$x('//a/img[contains(@alt,'Expand List')]')

Will give output like this: