Selenium 2 - Can findElement(By.xpath) be scoped to a particular element?

Question

All the examples of findElement(By.xpath) I\'ve seen search the whole page, e.g.

WebElement td = driver.findElement(By.xpath(\"//td[3]\"));

Answer 1

I also ran into this issue and spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out the workaround. And this is what I figured out:

WebElement td = tr.findElement(By.xpath("td[3]"));

Not sure why, but this works for me.