How can I use the “preceding-column” axis in Xpath for retrieving the data from a row of a table?

In the context of selenium, you can use the preceding sibling xpath for the process of retrieving the specific information or data from a row of a particular table.

For example, consider a scenario in which you have an HTML table and you aim to extract data from a specified column based on the value in a preceding column. For this, you can use the axis for navigating the structure.

Here is the example-based scenario given and Xpath expression:-

Let us say you have a table of HTML whose structure would look like this:-

    
        
        
    
    
        
        
    
    
        
        
    ProductPriceApple$1.99Orange$2.49

For extracting the price of a particular product (consider orange), you could use the “preceding sibling” axis to locate the price based on the name of the product:

//td[text()=’Orange’]/following-sibling::td[1]