Site icon Experience, Digital Engineering and Data & Analytics Solutions by Apexon

Are you ready to use CSS selectors with selenium?

Chirag Jayswal
Testing

Nowadays CSS selectors become popular and took place of xpath selectors. While locating elements the ideal candidate is to reference elements on the page by their unique id or name. If that is not possible, in case not available or auto generated, then XPath or CSS are the strategies available to you. Here you can get answer on Why CSS Locators are the way to go vs XPath.

One useful tool I found is FirePath which is a Firebug extension that adds a development tool to edit, inspect and generate XPath 1.0 expressions, CSS 3 selectors and JQuery selectors (Sizzle selector engine). The problem with fire path generates xpath specific to element but for css or Sizzle it is not always specific to selected element.

Selenium IDE 1.0.11
released on 30/May/2011 has inbuilt CSS locator builder! Selenium IDE will now create locators using CSS when recording. Also, same as getXpathCount, new command getCssCount added to count the number of nodes that match the specified css selector. So now using css selector you can get number of nodes that match the specified selector.

Sizzle, used by selenium as CSS selector engine, provides Positional and Form Selector Additions makes locator simpler and more readable, for instance:

You can find more details for additional selectors in Sizzle documentation.

I had documented some examples for defining complex CSS and X-Path selector.

Strategy X Path
 Sizzle(CSS) Comments
Element //div div locate first div element
By id //div[@id=’eleid’] div#eleid Locate div with id eleid
By class //div[@class=’eleclass’]

//div[contains(@class,’eleclass’)]

 div.eleclass locate div with class name eleclass if more than one class exist then xpath 2 will be used
By attribute //div[@title=’Move mouse here’]
  1. div[title=Move mouse here]
  2. div[title^=Move]
  3. div[title$=here]
  4. div[title*=mouse]
 you can use match operators for class and id as well, for example div[id^=menu-item]
Child //div[@id=’eleid’]/*

//div/h1

 div#eleid >*

div#eleid >h1
Descendant //div[@id=’eleid’]//h1 div h1 Will work for //div/*/…../h1
By index //li[6] li:nth(5) 6th li element
By content //a[contains(.,’Issue 1164′)] a:contains(Issue 1164) Case Sensitive
By Child
  1. //li[a[contains(.,’Issue 1244′)]]
  2. //*[./a[contains(.,’Issue 1244′)]]
  3. //ul[.//a[contains(.,’Issue 1244′)]]
  1. li{a:contains(Issue 1244)}
  2. ul{a:contains(Issue 1244)}
 <ul><li> Improved alert on changing the format <a href=””>Issue 1244</a></li>

<li>next sibling</li>…</ul>

<h3>Listing 2</h3>

<ul><li> Improved alert on changing the format <a href=””>Issue 1244</a></li>

<li>next sibling</li>…</ul>
Next Sibling
  1. //li[preceding-sibling::li[contains(.,’Issue 1244′)]]
  2. //ul[preceding-sibling::ul[.//a[contains(.,’Issue 1244′)]]]
  1. css=li:contains(Issue 1244) + li
  2. css=ul{a:contains(Issue 1244)} ~ ul

 

If you have not read Why CSS Locators are the way to go vs XPath blog posts, you must absolutely read it now.

Limitations of CSS locators

CSS is used for styling the document/elements and not originally for locating elements, so there are certain limitations too.

In Xpath :

Both 1 and 2 are will locate element li, having first child a[contains(.,’Issue 1244′)]

Whereas in CSS

Both 3 and 4 locates different elements. 3 is same as 1(assuming there is no other parent li element of li) but 4 locates first element that having child a:contains(Issue 1244) that is document root. There is no way to locate parent precisely.

Conclusions:

 

More Resources:

 

Exit mobile version