Locating child nodes of WebElements in selenium

java, selenium, webdriver, xpath

Solution

According to JavaDocs, you can do this:

WebElement input = divA.findElement(By.xpath(".//input"));

How can I ask in xpath for "the div-tag that contains a span with the text 'hello world'"?

WebElement elem = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[span[text()='hello world']]"));

The XPath spec is a suprisingly good read on this.

Problem

I am using selenium to test my web application and I can successfully find tags using `By.xpath`. However now and then I need to find child nodes within that node. Example: ``` <div id="a"> <div> <span /> <input /> </div> </div> ``` I can do: ``` WebElement divA = driver.findElement( By.xpath( "//div[@id='a']" ) ) ``` But now I need to find the input, so I could do: ``` driver.findElement( By.xpath( "//div[@id='a']//input" ) ) ``` However, at that point in code I only have `divA`, not its xpath anymore... I would like to do something like this: ``` WebElement input = driver.findElement( divA, By.xpath( "//input" ) ); ``` But such a function does not exist. Can I do this anyhow? BTW: Sometimes I need to find a `<div>` that has a certain decendent node. How can I ask in xpath for "the `<div>` that contains a `<span>` with the text `'hello world'`"?

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