Get next sibling element in Selenium

Selenium Python - Get the next sibling element

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

To get the next or following 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 'following-sibling::*[1] for the value parameter in the function call.

following-sibling::* represents all the following sibling elements of a given element. But we need only the next one sibling element. Therefore we using array notation [1].

If myelement is the WebElement object for which we would like to find the next sibling element, the code snippet for find_element() method is

myelement.find_element(By.XPATH, "following-sibling::*[1]")

The above method call returns a WebElement object containing the sibling element next to the given element.

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 the next sibling element

We shall take the child div div#child1 as our WebElement of interest, find its next 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('/tmp/selenium/index-19.html')

# Get the div element you are interested in
mydiv = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'child1')

# Get next sibling of mydiv
next_sibling = mydiv.find_element(By.XPATH, "following-sibling::*[1]")
print(next_sibling.get_attribute('outerHTML'))

# Close the driver
driver.quit()

Output

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

Similarly,

for child1: child2 is the next sibling element.
for child2: child3 is the next sibling element.
for child3, there is no next sibling element.

Summary

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