How to write Xpath ?

In Selenium-Rc/WebDriver automation xpath is the one of the way to locate elements on webpage.XPath uses path expressions to select nodes/element in an XML/ HTML document.

How to verify in firebug?

• Open firebug in firefox/Chrome.
• Go to console.
• type : $x("<xpath>").
• Hit Enter.
• If it is correct path you can element in that console. If you mouse hover on that, the element will highlight in web page.

Example:

How to write Xpath?

Examples

Facebook signup form

1. Select first name

 //input[@id='firstname]     OR       //input[@name=firstname]   

In this case no need of xpath locator because we can use By.id, By.name,By.cssSelector.
By.id("firstname")    |   By.name("firstname")  | By.cssSelector("[id=firstname]")

2. Selecting first name input using First Name label

 //label[text()='First Name:']/parent::td/following-sibling::td/div/input  
                          or  
      //label[text()='First Name:']/../../td/div/input  

In above example,

parent	This keyword helps you to back track to parent node from child node.
following-sibling	This keyword helps you to go following-sibling.
preceding-sibling	This keyword helps you to go preceding-sibling.
..	This also helps you to go parent node from child node

See below table for more keywords

3. Using contains, starts-with

Select Last Name using contains	//label[contains(text(),'Last')]/../../td/div/input
Select Last Name using starts-with	//label[starts-with(text(),'Last')]/../../td/div/input

4. Index/position based

5. Some more expressions

If you have any doubts in xpath..Post your html code snippet here I would try to give you solution.

Sources  : http://msdn.microsoft.com/  |  http://www.w3schools.com/xpath

Happy Coding..! 

Regards,

Santosh