How to find nearest parent by tag_name with selenium

Question

I'm working with "Table styled" web site by using `selenium-webdriver`. There are a lot of nesting of tables and there are no `id` or `name` attributes of them. So I decided to get header text in a table to find a place of data like this. ``` driver = Selenimum::WebDriver.for :firefox element = driver.find_element(:xpath, "//font[@color='#FFFFFF' and text()='some probably unique text']") ``` from HTML like this. ``` ...

some probably unique text

... ``` I want to get the inside `table` element from `font` element that I got in above code. I know I can get with `element.find_element(:xpath, "../../../..")`, but it's a little disgusting. I want to specify a tag name at least like this `element.find_element(:xpath, "../*/table")`. Is there way to do this?

Accepted Answer

You can use XPath axes `ancestor`.

```
element = driver.find_element(:xpath, ".//font[@color='#FFFFFF' and text()='some probably unique text']/ancestor::table")
```

Or nested XPath: not for nested tables situation like yours

```
element = driver.find_element(:xpath, ".//table[.//font[@color='#FFFFFF' and text()='some probably unique text']]")
```

How to find nearest parent by tag_name with selenium

Solution

Problem