Getting WebElement by Text using XPath in Selenium test

Question

I would like to find any WebElement based on text using XPath.

WebElement that I am interested to find,

Its HTML,

Basically my WebElement that I am trying to retrieve by Text contains an input element.

I currently use,

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Own Hotel']"));

which does not find the WebElement above, but it usually works to retrieve all other web elements.

Even,

By.xpath("//*[contains(text(),'Own Hotel')]")

did not give me any results. Although I am interested in exact text match.

I am looking for a way to find web element by text immaterial of the elements that are present inside the web element. If text matches, it should return the WebElement.

Thanks!

It is not a wait issue. I tested this xpath on chrome when the page was loaded, it does not find the element. Hence my xpath is not correct for this case. I need alternative xapth. — LINGS, Oct 01 '15 at 20:47
Please post the HTML code as text instead of a picture. At some future point the picture will no longer be available and this question won't be as helpful. — JeffC, Oct 01 '15 at 22:13

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

6

It seems text is wrapped inside a label and not input. Try this

driver.findElement(By.xpath(".//label[text()[normalize-space() = 'Own Hotel']]"));

There is nice explanation about this xpath pattern here

edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

Community

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answered Oct 01 '15 at 22:20

nilesh

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undetected Selenium · Answer 2 · 2020-02-20T22:10:37.783

In the HTML below:

HTML

The innerText Own Hotel within the <input> node contains a lot of white-space characters in the beginning as well at the end. Due to the presence of these leading and trailing white-space characters you can't use the location path text() as:

text() selects all text node children of the context node

As an alternative, you need to use the String Function string normalize-space(string?) as follows:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[normalize-space()='Own Hotel']"));

However, it would a better idea to make your search a bit more granular adding the tagName and preferably an unque attribute as follows:

Using tagName and normalize-space():

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[normalize-space()='Own Hotel']"));

Using tagName, and normalize-space():

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@name='ownHotel' and normalize-space()='Own Hotel']"));

References

you can find a couple of relevant discussions using normalize-space() in:

Getting WebElement by Text using XPath in Selenium test

2 Answers2

References