Get the child elements in Selenium

Selenium Python - Get the child elements

In this tutorial, you will learn how to get the child elements of a given element, in Selenium Python.

To get the child elements of a given element in Selenium Python, call the find_elements() method on the given element and pass By.XPATH for the by parameter, and '*' for the value parameter in the function call.

If myelement is the WebElement object for which we would like to find the child elements, the code snippet for find_elements() method is

myelement.find_elements(By.XPATH, '*')

The above method call returns a list of WebElement objects.

Example

In this example, we shall consider loading the webpage at URL: /tmp/selenium/index-19.html. The contents of this HTML file is given below. The web page contains a parent div with three 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>
 </body>
</html>

Selenium Python - Get parent element - Webpage

We shall take the parent div div#parent as our WebElement of interest, find its child elements, and print these elements 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('/tmp/selenium/index-19.html')

# Get the div element you are interested in
mydiv = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'parent')

# Get children of mydiv
children = mydiv.find_elements(By.XPATH, '*')

# Itertae over the children
for child in children:
    print("\nChild Element")
    print(child.get_attribute('outerHTML'))

# Close the driver
driver.quit()

Output

Child Element
<div id="child1">This is child 1.</div>

Child Element
<div id="child2">This is child 2.</div>

Child Element
<div id="child3">This is child 3.</div>

Summary

In this Python Selenium tutorial, we have given instructions on how to find the child elements of a given web element, with the help of an example program.