Locator has 3 matching nodes. How to get Selenium identify the required element?

Question

I'm new to Selenium WebDriver. I'm trying to automate a search function on a particular page.

There are a search input box and a search button (actually, it is a search icon) next to it. I'm able to identify the search box & enter (search) data into the box. But the problem is in identifying the search icon. Inspecting with Firebug shows it has 3 matching nodes. I see all 3 of them have identical attributes & values. The tag name indicates the search icon is an image file.

 <img id="search-icon" style="width:auto; height:23px" onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='/sites/all/themes/hjknewstheme/images/searchicon.png'" src="/sites/all/themes/hjknewstheme/images/gray_search.svg"/>

How can I get Selenium identify the locator for this element? I tried using ID & also customized XPath. Neither one is working. Any help in handling this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Here's the Xpath I used:

driver.findElementByXPath("//img[@src='/sites/all/themes/hjknewstheme/images/gray_search.svg']").click();

I also used id as a locator. That didn't work either. Here's a snippet of the search icon.

The search icon image is at the beginning of my post.

Answer 1

In your xpath simply add [1] or [2] or [3] to select the correct one out of the 3 matches.

driver.findElements(By.xpath("your locator here)[1]"));

This will fetch you the first element with same locator. Like wise

driver.findElements(By.xpath("(your locator here)[2]"));

will fetch you second element with the same locator

driver.findElement(By.id("(element id)[1]"))

Answer 2

Maybe it is not a best solution but arguably the easiest one. Find all your elements, using List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.xpath("your locator here"));

And then refer to it by element id in list of elements.

Answer 3

Ad @dyymni said, if you cannot identify element directly, you have to use some scripting magic:

• get list of matching elements, loop over it, and identify requested element by other means (some other attribute)
• identify a parent element which you can locate uniquely, then find sub-element.

All depends of the flexibility of the scripting language you use. I use Python (and try to avoid XPath if i can - and usually I can), and such "magic" is trivial.