How to use relative xpath for locating a web-element by particular Attribute

Question

I am trying to use Xpath. Using absolute Xpath is very lengthy and complicated. I want to know as how can I use relative Xpath by using Attribute to locate a web-element?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Hello @User,

Taking a simple example of facebook,

You want to locate the Email or Phone. 

Let's Inspect the element and see what it has for us.

<input type="email" class="inputtext" name="email" id="email" data-testid="royal_email">

Here we have many attributes to use such as type, class, name, id , data-testid.

You can directly use ID using

driver.findElement(By.Id("email"));

As you want to use the XPath lets see how to make use of relative Xpath.

the expression will come out to be as 

//input[contains(@id,'email')]

which will be used as follows:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[contains(@id,'email')]"));

This way you can use relative Xpath to locate an element using an Attribute.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Xpath=//tagname[@attribute='value']