selenium - writing an xpath using the count function

Question

For a HTML page like this I'm writing two xpath statements to fetch the text from a td element. First xpath is to get the position of the th element that matches my requirement.

count(.//th[contains(., 'Header5')]/preceding-sibling::*)+1

Then I put the count value returned from the above to this xpath and get the text

.//tr[2]/td[**count**]

How can I merge these two xpaths in to single xpath and get the result. I tried something like this but it always selects the first td

.//tr[2]/td[count(.//th[contains(., 'Header5')]/preceding-sibling::*)+1]
(.//tr[2]/td)[count(.//th[contains(., 'Header5')]/preceding-sibling::*)+1]

Here is the html structure

<thead>
    <th> Header1 </th>
    <th> Header2 </th>
    <th> Header3 </th>
    <th> Header4 </th>
    <th> Header5 </th>
    <th> Header6 </th>
</thead>
<tbody>
    <tr>
    <tr>
        <td> Cell1 </td>
        <td> Cell2 </td>
        <td> Cell3 </td>
        <td> Cell4 </td>
        <td> Cell5 </td>
        <td> Cell6 </td>
    </tr>
</tbody>

Andersson · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-17 14:19:14Z

1

This one should do the trick:

.//tr[2]/td[count(//th[contains(., 'Header5')]/preceding-sibling::th) + 1]

Note that /td[count(.//th)] means count of th nodes that are descendants of td while /td[count(//th)] means count of th wherever in DOM, so be careful with the context node (the dot)

edited Oct 17, 2018 at 14:19

answered Oct 17, 2018 at 14:10

Andersson

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1 Comment

mo-ta-to Over a year ago

yeah, now i understood why my code didn't work. thanks for clarifying.

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