Web element rediscovery system and method

A non-transitory computer readable medium comprising a plurality of instructions stored thereon that are executable by a computer processor to cause the processor to perform the steps of:

• comparing a one or more locators known to be associated with a sought element to a one or more locators of a one or more elements of a target web page;
• determining that the one or more elements of the target web page are not associated with a locator that uniquely identifies the sought element within the target web page and matches a locator of the one or more locators known to be associated with the sought element;
• and,
• in response to said determining,
• identifying within a pre-region of the target web page a pre-region longest matching segment of the pre-region that matches a pre-region segment of a pre-region of a source web page, where the target web page comprises at least one change as compared to the source web page, the pre-region of the source web page comprises an area of the source web page before an encoded position of the sought element in the source web page, the pre-region of the target web page comprises an area of the target web page before the encoded position in the target web page;
• identifying within a post-region of the target web page a post-region longest matching segment of the post-region that matches a post-region segment of a post-region of the source web page, where the post-region of the source web page comprises an area of the source web page after the encoded position, the post-region of the target web page comprises an area of the target web page after the encoded position in the target web page;
• determining the pre-region longest matching segment is within a pre-defined distance of the post-region longest matching segment;
• and,
• identifying a changed web element in the target web page that is between the pre-region longest matching segment and the post-region longest matching segment in response to the pre-region longest matching segment being determined to be within the pre-defined distance of the post-region longest matching segment.