XPath Complete Guide — 100 Practical Examples

Overview

This guide serves as a practical handbook for QA Engineers, Automation Testers, and SDETs utilizing Selenium and Playwright for browser automation. It focuses on XPath 1.0, providing 100 practical examples to cover fundamental concepts, predicates, text and attribute functions, axes, dynamic elements, forms, tables, SVG, and frames. The content includes Selenium and Playwright XPath patterns, debugging, best practices, anti-patterns, and interview-ready notes. The resource aims to equip testers with the knowledge to construct stable XPath expressions, emphasizing attributes, text, and relative structure while discouraging brittle absolute DOM paths or generated classes. It details how to think about XPath for robustness in test automation, including guidance on practical use cases and notes for both Selenium (By.xpath(...)) and Playwright (locator()).

Table of contents

1. XPath Fundamentals
2. Predicates, Indexing and Conditions
3. Text Matching and String Functions
4. Attribute Functions and Dynamic Values
5. Axes and Relationships
6. Forms and Interactive Controls
7. Tables, Lists and Repeated Components
8. SVG, Namespaces, Frames and Special DOM
9. Selenium and Playwright XPath Usage
10. Debugging, Anti-patterns and Interview Patterns