Selenium chromedriver unable to locate href tag nested inside class tags

[asad ali]

Hi everyone,

I'm using `selenium` web-driver, I want to capture or click on 

this HTML tag as

`\<a class="sub-nav-link style-scope app-shell active" href="#/trend-analysis/tag-search"\>`

I tried using 

`Driver.findElement(By.xpath(//a[@href='#/trend-analysis/tag-search']")).click();`

    <div class="collapse navbar-collapse style-scope app-shell" id="navbarNav">

                    <ul class="app-nav navbar-nav mr-auto style-scope app-shell">

                        <li class="nav-item style-scope app-shell">

                            <a class="nav-link p-3 px-4 style-scope app-shell" href="/#/dashboard">Dashboard</a>

                        </li>

                        <li class="nav-item style-scope app-shell">

                            <a class="nav-link py-3 px-4 style-scope app-shell active" href="/#/trend-analysis/tag-search">Trend

                                Analysis</a>

                            <ul class="sub-nav d-flex flex-row flex-nowrap list-unstyled style-scope app-shell">

                                <li class="sub-nav-item style-scope app-shell">

                                    <a class="sub-nav-link style-scope app-shell active" href="#/trend-analysis/tag-search">

                                        Trend Analysis

                                    </a>

**error**

    Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//*[@href='/#/trend-analysis/tag-search']"}

my guess is that it doesn't detect this href because its buried deep under many `<a>` and `<class>` tags. Please guide me.

[joseph...@gmail.com]

Your HTML says the link has this href:

href="#/trend-analysis/tag-search"

Your code says you are using this xpath:

//a[@href='#/trend-analysis/tag-search']

However, the error message says the code is actually trying to find this xpath:

//*[@href='/#/trend-analysis/tag-search']

The error message indicates that the xpath being used is searching for //* instead of //a (shouldn't matter, but will be a slower search due to checking all elements instead of only <a> elements) and that the href attribute should start with /# where the HTML only starts with # (this is where I think the problem is).

You can test xpaths in the browser dev tools by going to the console, entering in $x("<your xpath here>") and hitting enter to see what comes back.  If it works in the browser console, you should be able to get it to work in your code.