Webdriver findElements By xpath

Question

1)I am doing a tutorial to show how findElements By xpath works. I would like to know why it returns all the texts that following the

element with a

Answer 1

The XPath turns into this:

Get me all of the div elements that have an id equal to container.

As for getting the first etc, you have two options.

Turn it into a .findElement() - this will just return the first one for you anyway.

or

To explicitly do this in XPath, you'd be looking at:

(//div[@id='container'])[1]

for the first one, for the second etc:

(//div[@id='container'])[2]

Then XPath has a special indexer, called last, which would (you guessed it) get you the last element found:

(//div[@id='container'])[last()]

Worth mentioning that XPath indexers will start from 1 not 0 like they do in most programming languages.

As for getting the parent 'node', well, you can use parent:

//div[@id='container']/parent::*

That would get the div's direct parent.

You could then go further and say I want the first *div* with an id of container, and I want his parent:

(//div[@id='container'])[1]/parent::*

Hope that helps!