Quick XPath

Are you facing problems while trying to find XPath in Selenium? Well, you are not alone! This is among the most common challenges most developers face while using Selenium for web testing. But not anymore, as we have picked 10 of the best Chrome extensions to make it easier for you to find XPath in Selenium.

Before we begin, we think it’s a good idea to point out what is XPath in Selenium.

XPath is one of the most popular ways to find locations of WebElement in Selenium. With XPath expressions, you can find objects that are highly dynamic and fragile. Whenever you want to perform automation testing of any web applications, the first thing that you should do is identify the WebElements and the actions to be performed on them.

In case you are wondering how to use XPath in Selenium, we have got you covered! Find our blog on the complete guide for using XPath in Selenium with examples.

Selenium provides eight different locators to identify the WebElement on the web page. They are as follows: Id, name, className, linkText, partialLinkText, tagName, xpath, and cssSelector.

However, it could be challenging for the developers to find XPath of WebElements in Selenium while performing cross browser testing. For example, the element might not have any id, name, or className. In such cases, you could use XPath or CSS selector to locate the WebElement. With Chrome extensions, you can ease this process of finding XPath of web elements.

Advantages of using XPath to locate a WebElement

Using Selenium locators to locate an element on the webpage depends on the complexity of DOM (Document Object Model). Given below are five advantages of using XPath in Selenium as the locator to capture an element in the webpage:

• With the help of XPath locators, one can traverse the DOM either upwards or downwards.
• It helps in locating the elements in the webpage using the text.
• It helps locate the elements by establishing the relationship between parent node, child node, and descendant.
• Locates the exact element by specifying the position of the element in case there are multiple matches.
• Locates any element in DOM, uniquely.Here I am going to present the 10 best Google Chrome extensions to find XPath in Selenium which helps you find XPath easily.

  Selenium has gained enormous popularity in the field of test automation. Most of the companies adopting this tool. Being an automation tester myself, I know the challenges we face while finding robust XPath in Selenium.

  In the last chapter, we learned to use WebDriver Element Locator Tool, which is an Add On for Firefox Browser. Although that is a very easy tool and always my first choice, as it saves a lot of time. But it makes your XPath learning logic weak and you may struggle in the interview because of that. For the beginners, I would always suggest to avoid such tools or plugins.

  In this chapter, we will learn a new tool called XPath Helper an Add-On of Chrome Browser. Even though the same task can be done by Firefox and Firepath plugin, but still in case you love to use Chrome Browser, you might like to keep something handy within that. Before jumping on to its usage, let’s just see the step for its installation.

  XPath Helper Google chrome Extension overview

  XPath Helper chrome extension is Extract, edit, and evaluate XPath queries with ease..xpath helper makes it easy to extract, edit, and evaluate xpath queries on any webpage.

  IMPORTANT: After installing this extension, you must reload any existing tabs or restart chrome for the extension to work.

  Instructions: 1.

  Open a new tab and navigate to any webpage.

  2.

  Hit Ctrl-Shift-X (or Command-Shift-X on OS X), or click the xpath helper button in the toolbar, to open the xpath helper console.

  3.

  Hold down Shift as you mouse over elements on the page.

  The query box will continuously update to show the xpath query for the element below the mouse pointer, and the results box will show the results for the current query.

  4.

  If desired, edit the xpath query directly in the console.

  The results box will immediately reflect your changes.

  5.

  Repeat step (2) to close the console.

  If the console gets in your way, hold down Shift and then move your mouse over it; it will move to the opposite side of the page.

  One word of caution: When rendering html tables, chrome inserts artificial tags into the DOM, which will consequently show up in queries extracted by this extension.

  XPath Helper Chrome extension Download

  It is the XPath Helper google chrome extension download link you can download and install google chrome Browser.

  How to find XPath in Selenium? It’s a common challenge that troubles every test automation developer using Selenium for web testing. Hence, we picked seven most relevant Chrome Extensions that can help you find XPath in Selenium.

  XPath is the most powerful way of determining the locations of elements on a web page. Also, it’s the best locator strategy when you’ve to find objects which are highly dynamic and fragile. So it eventually becomes inevitable for every test automation developer to learn how to create custom XPath expressions.

  XPath syntax is extremely extensible. It supports regular expression, array-like formation to index elements, and functions as well. So learning to build XPath is a continuous process which you master with time.

  However, the Chrome browser has a no. of extensions to help in determining the XPath of web elements. With these turnkey Chrome extensions, it’s a bit easier to generate the XPaths. In this post, we are going to share seven such extensions which our team has evaluated as the most relevant to find the XPath in Selenium.

  Note: If you are willing to learn XPath to the depth, then do go through the below tutorials. You can come back to read these posts after looking into the list of Chrome extensions.

   

  What is XPath?

  XPath is a major element in the XSLT standard.

  XPath stands for XML Path Language, it is a language for finding information in XML documents. It was originally used to search for XML documents, but it is also suitable for searching HTML documents. So when doing crawlers, you can use XPath to extract the corresponding information.

   

  XPath uses “path like” syntax to identify and navigate nodes in an XML document.

  In addition, it also provides more than 200 built-in functions for string, numeric, and time matching, as well as the processing of nodes and sequences. Almost all the nodes you want to locate can be selected using XPath.

  In this tutorial, we are going to learn a very important topic of how to find XPath in the Chrome browser.

  XPath is the most powerful way to determine the location of elements on a web page. It is a query language for searching and selecting nodes from the XML document.

  I will recommend that you practice more and more to find XPath in chrome browser because when you would go for any company technical test, you will have to find XPath in Chrome browser only.

  Let’s know what are a few steps to find XPath in Chrome browser?

  What is XPath?

  XPath is a major element in the XSLT standard.

  XPath can be used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document.

  a	XPath stands for XML Path Language XPath uses “path like” syntax to identify and navigate nodes in an XML document XPath contains over 200 built-in functions XPath is a major element in the XSLT standard XPath is a W3C recommendation