Selenium Python – Get all the previous sibling elements
In this tutorial, you will learn how to get all the previous sibling elements of a given element, in Selenium Python.
To get all the previous sibling elements of a given element in Selenium Python, call the find_elements() method on the given element and pass By.XPATH for by parameter, and 'preceding-sibling::*' for the value parameter in the function call.
preceding-sibling::* represents all the previous sibling elements for a given element. But it also contains the calling web element. Therefore, we can use Python Slicing technique to remove the first element.
If my_element is the WebElement object for which we would like to find all the previous sibling elements, the code snippet for find_elements() method is
my_element.find_elements(By.XPATH, "preceding-sibling::*")The above method call returns a list of WebElement objects containing the sibling elements previous to the given element.
Example
In this example, we shall consider loading the webpage at URL: https://pythonexamples.org/tmp/selenium/index-20.html. The contents of this HTML file is given below. The web page contains a parent div with four children divs.
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello Family</h1>
<div id="parent">
<div id="child1">This is child 1.</div>
<div id="child2">This is child 2.</div>
<div id="child3">This is child 3.</div>
<div id="child4">This is child 4.</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
We shall take the child div div#child3 as our WebElement of interest, find all of its previous sibling elements, and print them to standard output.
Python Program
from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
# Setup chrome driver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=ChromeService(executable_path=ChromeDriverManager().install()))
driver.set_window_size(500, 400)
# Navigate to the url
driver.get('https://pythonexamples.org/tmp/selenium/index-20.html')
# Get the div element you are interested in
mydiv = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'child3')
# Get all previous siblings of mydiv
previous_siblings = mydiv.find_elements(By.XPATH, "preceding-sibling::*")
# Print the previous siblings
for sibling in previous_siblings:
print("\nPrevious Sibling")
print(sibling.get_attribute('outerHTML'))
# Close the driver
driver.quit()Output
Previous Sibling
<div id="child1">This is child 1.</div>
Previous Sibling
<div id="child2">This is child 2.</div>#child3 has two preceding siblings namely, #child1 and #child2.
Summary
In this Python Selenium tutorial, we have given instructions on how to find all the previous or preceding sibling elements of a given web element, with the help of an example program.