How to escape single quote in xpath 1.0 in selenium for python

Question

I have the following code line used in selenium python script:

from selenium import webdriver

driver.find_element_by_xpath(u"//span[text()='" + cat2 + "']").click()

cat2 is variable from a database list that i get like this:

db = Database()
sql = "SELECT * FROM missing
listeproduit = db.select(sql)
for record in listeproduit:
    cat2       = record[6]

The probleme is when the variable contain a text like this:

cat2 = Debimetre d'air

Then the script don't works because it's an illegal xpath expression.

From my search, i understand that it's a problem with escaping the single quote in my variable cat2

From this answers :Escape single quote in XPath with Nokogiri?

They suggest to use concat() xpath function, but how to use it in my case ? Thanks for your help.

Cheers

I tried already this but as abel said xpath has a different escape mechanism. — Andronaute, Sep 24 '15 at 10:52

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

In XPath 1.0, which is used by browsers and therefore by Selenium, there is no native way of escaping string literals (which was remedied in XPath 2.0). A few workarounds are mentioned by this poster, which includes:

First off, make sure you understand the difference between escaping in Python, which is possible, and escaping within the XPath expression
Then, if you simply need a single quote, surround it by double quotes, and vice versa
Then, if one string literal contains both double and single quotes, use something like concat('"', "Here's Johnny", '"', ", said Johnny."), which combines to the literal: "Here's Johnny", said Johnny..

In your case, this would work:

driver.find_element_by_xpath(u"//span[text()=\"" + cat2 + "\"]").click()

Another way around this is to set an XPath variable to contain the value of your string literal, which helps in readability. But I couldn't find how to do it with the web drivers for Selenium, which typically means there is no such method available.

Great answer! In fact the best I've seen regarding this issue, well done. — Ory Zaidenvorm, Oct 19 '16 at 04:29

score 5 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 10 '20 at 07:00

Here is a Python function I've just wrote that escapes a string to use in an XPath 1.0 expression, using the trick described in @Abel's answer:

def escape_string_for_xpath(s):
    if '"' in s and "'" in s:
        return 'concat(%s)' % ", '\"',".join('"%s"' % x for x in s.split('"'))
    elif '"' in s:
        return "'%s'" % s
    return '"%s"' % s

Note that it adds the appropriate kind of quotes around your string, so be sure not to add extra quotes around the return value.

Usage example:

escaped_title = escape_string_for_xpath('"that\'ll be the "day"')

driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[@title=' + escaped_title + ']')

How to escape single quote in xpath 1.0 in selenium for python

2 Answers2

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