XPath in Firebug console with a space in content

Question

I am trying to use an XPath in the Firebug console to get a <span> element's text content. The actual <span> tag content is 'first name' with a space within as shown below:

<span class="vl-cell e-listview-container-mail-Col5" iscell="1">first name</span>

When I enter the XPath below into Firebug's command line

$x("//div[@id='tble-listview-container-mail']/div[2]/span[4]")[0].innerHTML

I get the following output:

"first name"   // getting a   for the space within the string 'first name'.

When I want to get the element containing this text like

$x("//div[@id='tble-listview-container-mail']/div[2]/span[text()='first name']")

I get this as output:

[]  // output is returned as empty

Can someone tell how I can get the element if the inner text has a space within it?

Answer 1

Note that the   in the output is an indication that you have a non-breaking space between the two words and not a normal space.

Therefore the output array is empty when you search for the containing text first name (with normal space). You need to search for first name (with non-breaking space) instead. I.e. the function call then looks like this:

$x("//div[@id='tble-listview-container-mail']/div[2]/span[text()='first name']")

Note: You can display HTML entities using their name or Unicode representation via the HTML panel options 'Show Entities As Names' and 'Show Entities As Unicode'.