Find XPath for dynamic numeric value in a web page

Question

Looking for an XPath for a webpage where after every booking a Rel# generate. Need to validate the Rel# is saved in a different tab or not.

So the HTML page says:

I tried with the given xpath

"//*[@id="summaryDiv"]/table[4]/tbody/tr[2]/td[1]/b[2]"

also with "//b[contains(.,'Rel#:')]/parent::td"

But every time it returns the value "b" but not any relation numbers.

What should I use identifying the correct XPath for Rel#?

Answer 1

Step one would be to tell development to make the html more automation friendly, because this is pretty awful. :) I hope you have good persuasion skills.

You can probably clean this up, but here is an example using both contains and text()= for getting the text element.

"//*[@id='summaryDiv']/table[4]//text()[following-sibling::b[contains(text(), 'Unit Numb')] and preceding-sibling::b[text()='Rel#:']]"

The important thing to remember here, is that even though you don't see a tag around some of the text, text() itself can work to find those text() elements, as if it was a normal tag.

While following and preceding may look a bit backwards here, it essentially means look for some text before the 'b' node text that contains 'Unit Numb' and after the 'b' node text that is 'Rel#:'.

This should give you the number with some extra white space, but you can trim it and parse it from there.