Selenium cannot find SVG element in XPath

Question

I have the following HTML:

<div id="imageholder>
    <svg>
        <g> <image href='blah.gif'> </g>
    </svg>
</div>

And I cannot seem to locate the svg with selenium IDE on firefox at all. I have tried:

//svg
//svg:svg
//*[name()='svg']
//*[namespace-uri()='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg']

None of them can locate my svg element. Sometimes I get the error:

error = TypeError: e.scrollIntoView is not a function

I'm using this as a means to use the locator in JUnit 4 testing if that helps.

score 84 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 22 '13 at 07:57

84

Try the following XPath expression:

//*[local-name() = 'svg']

(works at least from Chrome/FireBug console, haven't tried with Selenium yet)

answered Feb 22 '13 at 07:57

Touko

6

Thanks, this solved a similar issue for me. Any idea why simply '//svg' would not work? – Len Nov 12 '13 at 13:46
3

Related to XML namespaces if I have understood correctly. (Haven't digged much into this) – Touko Nov 12 '13 at 14:06
I do want to clarify that the error `TypeError: e.scrollIntoView is not a function` is merely an error because the SVG DOM element doesn't support scrolling into view thru that function (and thus, the error still happen with @Touko's fix). But that error should be dismissable as it's just Selenium-IDE's way of showing you that it found the element. A `waitForElementPresent` command would work just the same without the `TypeError`. – Mauricio Morales Feb 01 '16 at 20:28
This worked to find the element, but failed to find child elements by extending the path. I had first find the svg, then do an addition `svg.find_element` – dansalmo Nov 16 '17 at 16:11

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 10 '16 at 07:06

4

The question is about xPath, but if you can use CSS Selectors, that would be more readable, like so (Java).

WebElement image = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#imageholder > svg > g > image"));

answered Aug 10 '16 at 07:06

Matthias Bloch

1

I would like to know why? CSS works in my Firefox where XPATH does not. But I only have XPATH in LXML for Python, so am doomed to give up. – John Mar 18 '18 at 20:56

2 Answers2