How to access element using Watir and XPath

Question

I have some HTML that looks like this:

<h1 id="header">Header</h1>

I would like to click it using Watir and XPath.

Solution 1

browser.h1(:xpath, "//h1[@id='header']").click

Solution 2

After watir-webdriver 0.5.1 selecting random element with an xpath was updated to:

browser.element(:xpath => "//h1[@id='header']").click

thanks to: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/watir-general/c6Orvy7Qalw

Solution 3

browser.element_by_xpath("//h1[@id='header']").click

Sources:

• http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/XPath
• http://zeljkofilipin.com/2007/07/03/find-element-by-xpath/

Solution 4

Also not XPath, but works:

browser.h1(:html, /header/).click

View more solutions

Comments

[Dan Herman]

this doesn't work for me. There does not appear to be element_by_xpath anymore

[Željko Filipin]

I think element_by_xpath was deprecated recently.

[Željko Filipin]

I have just checked,element_by_xpath was removed from watir-webdriver in version 0.5.1: github.com/watir/watir-webdriver/blob/master/CHANGES.md#051

[akostadinov]

Seems like it is replaced with .element(:xpath => "str"), have not tested it yet. Courtesy of groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/watir-general/c6Orvy7Qalw

[akostadinov]

I assume :html means the html source of the element, correct? So in your example matching it with a pattern?