CODEWITHSUNDEEP
seleniumxpath
Alex.K
Alex.K

Reputation: 294

Finding tag by xpath by a text that has an inner tag inside

I've recently come across an issue.

I need to find a div tag on a page, that contain specific text. The problem is, that text is divided into two parts by an inner link tag, so that an HTML tree would look like:

**<html>
    <...>
    <div>
        start of div text - part 1
        <a/>
        end of div text - part 2
    </div>
    <...>
</html>**

To uniquely identify that div tag I'd need two parts of div text. Naturally, I would come up with something like this XPath:

.//div[contains(text(), 'start of div text') and contains(text(), 'end of div text')]

However, it doesn't work, the second part can not be found.

What would be the best approach to describe this kind of tag uniquely?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2936

Answers (5)

pcwhite
pcwhite

Reputation: 135

If all you want is the div element of those child text elements, then you could isolate a piece of unique content from "part 1" and try the following:

//*[contains(., 'part 1')]/parent::div

This way you wouldn't have to think about the div's attributes.

However, this is usually not best practice. Ideally, you should use the following Xpath in most cases:

//div[@id,('some id') and contains(., 'part 1')]

Upvotes: 0

undetected Selenium
undetected Selenium

Reputation: 193108

You were almost there. You simply need to replace the text() with . as follows:

//div[contains(., 'start of div text') and contains(., 'end of div text')]

Here is the snapshot of the validation :

xpath_tester

Upvotes: 1

Andersson
Andersson

Reputation: 52665

try to use below XPath to match required div by two text nodes:

//div[normalize-space(text())="start of div text - part 1" and normalize-space(text()[2])="end of div text - part 2"]

Upvotes: 3

cruisepandey
cruisepandey

Reputation: 29362

Well if you have HTML DOM tree like this : 

<div id="container" class="someclass">
    <div>
        start of div text - part 1
        <a/>
        end of div text - part 2
    </div>
 </div>

for extracting div text, you can write xpath like this : 

//div[@id='container']/child::div

P.S : Writing xpath based on text to find the same exact text is not a good way to write Xpath.

Upvotes: 0

Kevin Kamonseki
Kevin Kamonseki

Reputation: 141

This should work:

//div[contains(text(), 'start of div text') and contains(./a/text(), 'end of div text')]

Upvotes: 0

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