Selenium Python – Get the previous sibling element
In this tutorial, you will learn how to get the immediate previous sibling element of a given element, in Selenium Python.
To get the preceding or immediate previous sibling element of a given element in Selenium Python, call the find_element() method on the given element and pass By.XPATH for by parameter, and 'preceding-sibling::*[1] for the value parameter in the function call.
preceding-sibling::* represents all the previous sibling elements of a given element. But we need only the immediate previous one sibling element. Therefore we using array notation [1].
If myelement is the WebElement object for which we would like to find the previous sibling element, the code snippet for find_element() method is
myelement.find_element(By.XPATH, "preceding-sibling::*[1]")The above method call returns a WebElement object containing the sibling element preceding (previous) to the given element.
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>where
- for child1: there is no previous sibling element.
- for child2: child1 is the previous sibling element.
- for child3, child2 is the previous sibling element.
We shall take the child div div#child2 as our WebElement of interest, find its previous sibling element, and print this element 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, 'child2')
# Get previous sibling of mydiv
previous_sibling = mydiv.find_element(By.XPATH, "preceding-sibling::*[1]")
print(previous_sibling.get_attribute('outerHTML'))
# Close the driver
driver.quit()Output
<div id="child1">This is child 1.</div>Summary
In this Python Selenium tutorial, we have given instructions on how to find the previous sibling element of a given web element, with the help of an example program.