CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javastringseleniumselenium-webdrivercss-selectors
Carl
Carl

Reputation: 107

My question about Selenium's find element by css selector

I'm using Selenium to find an web element by css selector. When I hard code it, it works fine like below.

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("div[aria-label=\"2018-10-17 Shared Google Drive Folder\"]")).getAttribute("data-id");

However, if I want to customize the css selector string based on date like below, it throws a error: 

org.openqa.selenium.InvalidSelectorException: invalid selector: An invalid or illegal selector was specified

I print out the cssFormatString and it looks exactly the same as hard coded one above. Could anyone tell me where it went wrong?

// Customized cssFormatString code
Date date = new Date();
DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
String strDate = dateFormat.format(date);
String cssFormatString = "div[aria-label=\\\"" + strDate +  " Shared Google Drive Folder\\\"]";
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(cssFormatString)).getAttribute("data-id");

Upvotes: 2

Views: 875

Answers (4)

Cristian Mira
Cristian Mira

Reputation: 41

You have to use single quotes instead of double quotes, for example:

String cssFormatString = "div[aria-label='2018-10-17 Shared Google Drive Folder']"

Upvotes: 2

Sers
Sers

Reputation: 12255

You code not work because you use unnecessary backslashes \
Result of your code is div[aria-label=\"2018-10-18 Shared Google Drive Folder\"] and because of backslashes you get invalid selector error.

Use one backslash to escape quotes like in code below:

String cssFormatString = "div[aria-label=\"" + strDate +  " Shared Google Drive Folder\"]"

Value will be: div[aria-label="2018-10-18 Shared Google Drive Folder"]

Or use single quotes like in @Navarasu answer.

Upvotes: 0

undetected Selenium
undetected Selenium

Reputation: 193058

If you want to construct a cssSelector using the value from strDate and the text Shared Google Drive Folder you can use the following solution:

// Customized cssFormatString code
Date date = new Date();
DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
String strDate = dateFormat.format(date);
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("div[aria-label^='" + strDate + "'][aria-label$='Shared Google Drive Folder']")).getAttribute("data-id");

Upvotes: 1

Navarasu
Navarasu

Reputation: 8479

Simply use single quotes instead of double quotes, it should work.

String cssFormatString = "div[aria-label='2018-10-17 Shared Google Drive Folder']"

So your string concatination will be simple,

String cssFormatString = "div[aria-label='" + strDate +  " Shared Google Drive Folder']"

Upvotes: 6

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