While automating modern Web pages with a lot of dynamic content, it becomes imperative to learn the usage of Advanced XPath expressions. Since teaching you the usage of XPaths from the very beginning is out of the scope of this article, you can get acquainted with XPath basics using the following article from W3Schools - XPath Tutorial.


Let us take 3 example scenarios where we need to find the XPaths for the dynamic date elements:

1. Fetch Today's date in the date widget.

2. Fetch Tomorrow's date in the date widget.

3. Fetch 'Today + n days' date in the date widget.


Advanced Example 1: Fetch today's date

In most cases, there will be a distinct class name for today's date html element. This will be different for different date libraries but there exists a pattern. We just need to find this pattern to get the XPath for today.

In this case, we have JqueryUI 's datepicker where you can see that the class name consists of "highlight". So we can write XPath for today as:

//td/a[@class='ui-state-default ui-state-highlight']

Advanced Example 2: Fetch 'tomorrow's date

Based on Example 1, we have XPath for today.

For the next day i.e tomorrow, it would be the following 'td' element as shown below:

//td/a[@class='ui-state-default ui-state-highlight']/following::td[1]



Advanced Example 3: Fetch 'today + 7 days' date

Based on the above Examples, we have XPath for today.

For the 7th day i.e 7 days from today, it would be the following 'td' element with postion=7 as shown below:

//td/a[@class='ui-state-default ui-state-highlight']/following::td[7]