Why is XPath counting the wrong number of substrings?-CodePudding

I am trying to count the number of times a element with a partial text of "25516.B1-" appears on the page.

Right now I am trying this. However it returns 17 even though there are only 3 instances of the element on the page.

Count 3 basiskerntaken
${count}=  Get Element Count   //*[contains(.,"25516.B1-")]
Log To Console  ${count}

CodePudding user response：

_{^{I will use generic XPath and XML for the benefit of future readers, but the concepts are the same and can be applied to any framework that uses XPath, including robotframework. See addendum regarding selenium's limitations, however.}}

Counting the number of elements whose string value contains a substring,

count(//*[contains(.,"substring")])

will overcount the number of occurrences of the "substring" due to the nesting of elements. For example, both e and r have string values that contain "substring":

<r>
  <e>substring</e>
</r>

Instead, count the number of text nodes that contain the substring:

count(//text()[contains(.,"substring")])

There is only one such text node in the above example.

Note that this assumes that text is not partitioned across child elements:

<r>
  <e><b>subs</b>tring</e>
</r>

Selenium-specific Addendum

@Trapli reports that "selenium insists to return webelements only, it won't return text nodes", here's a work-around that will return elements that selenium can then count:

//*[text()[contains(.,"substring")]]

This returns all elements that have a text node child that contains the provided "substring". It is unfortunate that selenium is limited in how it hosts XPath — most hosts are not so restrictive.

CodePudding user response：

If you know you have elements with that partial text, I would say using FindElements method to find all occurences of that method, it returns a list of elements , you can simply call List.count ();

List<WebElement> elementName = driver.findElements(By.LocatorStrategy("LocatorValue"));

elementname.count is your answer.

CodePudding user response：

Update the generic xpath to a bit more specific xpath as follows:

${count}=  Get Element Count   //tag_name[contains(.,"25516.B1-")]

More canonically:

${count}=  Get Element Count   //tag_name[contains(.,"25516") and contains(.,"B1-")]

See also

Selenium-specific Addendum