How to get the child elements in Python 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: https://pythonexamples.org/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>
Copy
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('https://pythonexamples.org/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()
Copy

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.

Quiz on Selenium

Q1. What is Selenium Python used for?

Not answered

Q2. What is a web driver in Selenium Python?

Not answered

Q3. Which of the following is not a popular web driver used in Selenium Python?

Not answered

Q4. What is the method used to switch to a different frame in Selenium Python?

Not answered

Q5. What is the method used to clear the text from an input field in Selenium Python?

Not answered
Code copied to clipboard successfully 👍