Develop Reference

Find element in selenium

I am using Selenium with C# to run some tests. I have an issue with an element which i can not locate. I know it is there, and I have it in html. even knowing everything about it, i can not seem to find it. When I used nodeJS it was pretty easy to locate, but in C# I just can not. After trying so many things, I thought I would ask here.
I get OpenQA.Selenium.NoSuchElementException when using the following:
IWebElement Title = driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//*[contains(., 'TextHere')]"));
I tried using the css path, xpath and tag, but the only case where I even found something was with tag. And it was not the correct element.
Is there just something majorly wrong with my syntax? I have looked at multiple threads about this and all the syntax they used haven't worked either.

say or between two calls of contains function
//*[contains(text(), 'About us') or contains(text(), 'about us')]
or use translate function to make xpath case insensitive
//*[contains(translate(text(), 'ABOUTS', 'abouts'), 'about us')]
when you are using Contain text make sure the contain text is unique or else you will get list of result and based on your condition iterate it.

Ok, so I figured it out. The element was inside an iframe. But not only that, it was also being created by a function which ran on load. Meaning i had to put in a delay to wait for it to load.
Here is the working code in case anyone is looking at a similar issue:
driver.SwitchTo().Frame(driver.FindElement(By.Id("iFrame id")));
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(500);
IWebElement Title = driver.FindElement(By.XPath("path to element"));
Just using sleep might not be optimal, but I am quite new at this, and it works. If someone has a good replacement i would love to hear suggestions.

Can't find CssSelector with Selenium

I am trying to do some automated tests with Selenium, but I have a problem. I want to be able to press a special button, but this button does not have an ID or Class, which is the first thing I try to look for.
I Think that I need to use the CssSelector, but how exactly should I write to find the correct button in my test?
driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector(??))

You can use the sibling <table> id as starting point
driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("#tbl_bestallningslita ~ button"));
Or use the onclick attribute (partial)
driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("[onclick*='btn_taBort']"));

Any of the below CSSLocators should help:
button[accessKey="T"]
OR
button[onclick="folkbokforing_form.btn_taBort.click()"]

You can use xpath too, xpath gives you more flexibility over cssselector although its quite slower than cssselector.
driver.findElement(By.XPath("*//button[#onclick='folkbokforging_form.btn.taBort.click()']"));
or use combined two attributed xpath,
driver.findElement(By.XPath("*//button[#accesskey='T' and contains(#onlcinck,'btn_taBort.click()')]");

Why is this seemingly simple Xpath navigation not working?

I'm having what seems like a really simple problem. I'm trying to navigate to an element in HTML by Xpath, and can't seem to get it to function properly.
I want to grab a span from the html contents of a page. The page is fairly complex, so I've been using Firebug's "get element by xpath" and pasting the result into my code. I've noticed it's slightly different than the xpath you get from doing the same thing in Chrome, but they both seem to direct to the same place.
The html I'm trying to navigate is found here. The field I'm trying to access via xpath is the first "Results 1 - 10 of n".
Based on FireBug's 'inspect element' the xpath should be: /html/body/div/center/table/tbody/tr[6]/td/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr/td/span
However when I try to use this xpath to identify the element in a C# codebehind, it gives me a number of errors that that path cannot be found.
Am I doing something wrong here? I've tried a number of permutations of the xpath and I don't understand why this wouldn't be cooperating within code.
Edit: I'm having this problem both in HTMLAgilityPack (but managed to hack out a bad solution using regexes instead) and a SELECT statement modeled after the answer found here
Edit 2: I'm trying to figure out this issue using Yahoo's free proxy as shown in the example here:
var query = 'SELECT * FROM html WHERE url="http://mattgemmell.com/2008/12/08/what-have-you-tried/" and xpath="//h1" and class="entry-title"';
var url = "http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=" + query + "&format=json&callback=??";
$.getJSON(url,function(data){
alert(data.query.results.h1.content);
})
I'm having the same problems with HTML agility pack but I'm more interested in getting this part to work. It works for the provided URL that the answerer gave me (seen above). However when I try to use even simple xpath expressions on the http://nl.newsbank.com url, I get errors that no object has been retrieved every time, no matter how basic the xpath.
Edit 3: I thought I'd elaborate a little more on the big picture of the larger problem I'm trying to solve of which this problem is a critical component in the hopes that maybe it provides a little more insight.
To learn basic ASP.NET development skills from scratch, I decided to make a simple web application, based around the news archive search at http://nl.newsbank.com/. In its current iteration, it sends a POST request (although I've now learned you can use a GET request and just dump the body at the end of the URL) to send search criteria, as if the user entered criteria in the search bar. It then searches the response (using RegExes, not Xpath because I couldnt get that working) for the "Results 1-n of n" span, extracts n, and dumps it in a table. It's a cool little tool for looking up news occurrence rates over time.
I wanted to add functionality such that you could enter a date range (say May 2002 - June 2010) and run a frequency search for every month / week in that range. This is very easy to implement conceptually. HOWEVER the problem is, right now all this happens server side, and since there's no API, the HTTP response contains the entire page, and is therefore very bandwidth intensive. Sending dozens of queries at once would swallow absolutely unspeakable amounts of bandwidth and wouldn't be even a little scalable.
As a result I tried rewriting the application to work client-side. However because of the same-origin policy I'm not able to send a request to an external host from the client-side. HOWEVER there is a loophole that I can use a free Yahoo proxy that makes the request and converts it to JSON, and then I can use the JSON exception of the Same-Origin Policy to retrieve that data from the proxy.
Here's where I'm running into these xpath problems specific to http://nl.newsbank.com. I'm not able to retrieve html with any xpath, and I'm not sure why or how I can fix it. When debugging in VS2010, I'll receive the error Microsoft JScript runtime error: Unable to get value of the property 'content': object is null or undefined

As paul t. already mentioned in a comment, the TBODY elements are generated by the webkit engine. The next problem is that the DIV between the BODY and CENTER does not exist on the page by default. It is added by an JS statement on line 119.
After stripping out the DIV and TBODY elements like
/html/body/center/table/tr[6]/td/table/tr/td[2]/table/tr/td/table/tr/td/table/tr/td/table/tr/td/span
i can successfull select a node with the HthmlAgilityPack.
Edit: don't use tools like Firebug for getting an XPath value on a website. Don't even use it if you just want wo look at the source of the page. The problem with Firebug is, that it will show you the current DOM document tree which probably on almost every is already (heavily) modified by JS.

Your sample HTML page's elements haven't got many classes to select on, but if you're interested in the first <span> element that contains "Results: 1 - 10 of n", you can use an XPath expression that explicitly targets this textual content.
For example:
//table//span[starts-with(., "Results:")]
will select all <span> elements, contained in a <table>, and that contain text beginning with "Results:" (the //table is not strictly necessary in your case I think, but might as well restrict a little)
You want the first one of these <span>, so you can use this expression:
(//table//span[starts-with(., "Results:")])[1]
Note the brackets around the whole previous expression and then [1] to select the first of all the <span> matching the text

It may sound kind of simplistic, but the element you are looking for is the only doc element that is using the css class "basic-text-white". I would think this would be a lot easier to find and extract than a long xpath. Web-scraping is never a stable thing, but I would think this is probably as stable as the xpath. Trying to debug the xpath just about makes my eyes bleed.

XML: Searching elements for specific text using C#

I'm trying to get a list of PDF links from different websites. First I'm using the Web client class to download the page source. I then use sgmlReader to convert the HTML to XML. So for one particular site, I'll get a tag that looks like this:
<p>1985 to 1997 Board Action Summary</p>
I need to grab all the links that contain ".pdf". Obviously not all websites are laid out the same, so just searching for a <p> tag, wont be dynamic enough. I'd rather not use linq, but I will if I have to. Thanks in advance.

Linq makes this easy...
var hrefs = doc.Root.Descendants("a")
.Where(a => a.Attrib("href").Value.ToUpper().EndsWith(".PDF"))
.Select(a => a.Attrib("href"));
away you go! (note: did this from memory, so you might have to fix it somewhat)
This will break down for <a/> tags that don't have an href (anchors) but you can fix that surely...

I think you have 2 options here. If you need only the links, you can use Regular Expressions to find the matches for strings ending with .pdf. If you need to manipulate the XML structure or get other values from the XML, it would be better to use XmlDocument and use an XPath query to find out the nodes which have a link to a pdf file in it. Using LINQ to XML just reduces the number of lines of code you have to write.

Read specific text from page into string array in C#

I've tried this and searched for help but I cannot figure it out. I can get the source for a page but I don't need the whole thing, just one string that is repeated. Think of it like trying to grab only the titles of articles on a page and adding them in order to an array without losing any special characters. Can someone shed some light?

You can use a Regular Expression
to extract the content you want from a string, such as your html string.
Or you can use a DOM parser such as
Html Agility Pack
Hope this helps!

You could use something like this -
var text = "12 hello 45 yes 890 bye 999";
var matches = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Matches(text,#"\d+").Cast<Match>().Select(m => m.Value).ToList();
The example pulls all numbers in the text variable into a list of strings. But you could change the Regular Expression to do something more suited to your needs.

if the page is well-formed xml, you could use linq to xml by loading the page into an XDocument and using XPath or another way of traversing to the element(s) you desire and loading what you need into the array for which you are looking (or just use the enumerable if all you want to do is enumerate). if the page is not under your control, though, this is a brittle solution that could break at any time when subtle changes could break the well-formedness of the xml. if that's the case, you're probably better off using regular expressions. eiither way, though, the page could be changed under you and your code suddenly won't work anymore.
the best thing you could do would be to get the provider of the page to expose what you need as a webservice rather than trying to scrape their page.