How to get the immediate previous sibling in Selenium Python?

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: /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 previous sibling element

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('/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.