site i am selecting from looks roughly like this
<div class="start-left">
...
<div class="news-post">...</div>
<div class="news-post">...</div>
<!-- want to get this one above -->
<div class="news-post">...</div>
<div class="news-post">...</div>
<div class="news-post">...</div>
<div class="news-post">...</div>
...
</div>
tried this but didnt work on either firefox or chrome
document.querySelector('.start-left div:nth-child(2)')
is this even possible or do i need to rething how i am doing this? I am using puppeteer for a webscraper and need to be able to press a link in a specific news post, e.g the second one
nth-child(n) counts all children of the element, regardless of the type of element (tag name). If there are other elements of different type coming before your target element nth-child will fail to find the correct element and may return null.
However, the selector nth-of-type(n)
matches elements based on their position among siblings of the same type (tag name)
and ignores elements of a different type.
// nth-child(2) returns null because the 2nd element is not a div
var wrongElement = document.querySelector('.start-left div:nth-child(2)');
// nth-of-type(2) filters using the type of element
var correctElement = document.querySelector('.start-left div:nth-of-type(2)');
console.log('div:nth-child(2): ' + wrongElement);
console.log('div:nth-of-type(2): ' + correctElement.outerHTML);<div class="start-left">
<p class="news-post">...</p>
<p class="news-post">Not this</p>
<div class="news-post">...</div>
<div class="news-post">This one</div>
<!-- want to get this one above -->
<div class="news-post">...</div>
</div>You could use your work-around by adding the number of preceding elements to the selector, eg nth-child(4), however, a more robust solution is to use nth-of-type(2).