How to locate element using text() facing exception(selenium+python)?

Question

HTML

<span class="menu-text">Download App</span>

my code to locate the element

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("//span[contains(text(),'App')]")

or

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("//span[contains(.,'App')]")

when I run it, an exception reported:

selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: Given css selector expression "//span[contains(text(),'App')]" is invalid: InvalidSelectorError: '//span[contains(text(),'App')]' is not a valid selector: "//span[contains(text(),'App')]"

Answer 1

Since your using a xpath expression, use driver.find_element_by_xpath instead

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(text(),'App')]")

hope this helps

Answer 2

You Are Giving Xpath to css selector it's wrong!

you need to give xpath to xpath function not css selector function

That's Why You Are Getting That Error

Try This:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(text(),'App')]")

Answer 3

This error message...

selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: Given css selector expression "//span[contains(text(),'App')]" is invalid: InvalidSelectorError: '//span[contains(text(),'App')]' is not a valid selector: "//span[contains(text(),'App')]"

...implies that the css selector expression which you have used is not a valid css selector.

---

Using css-selectors to locate element by text is not supported through Selenium yet (although it may work in the developer tools console). The only possibility is xpath

You can find a detailed discussion in selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException with "span:contains('string')"

---

So using css_selectors as per the HTML you have provided you can use the following Locator Strategy:

span.menu-text

However your code trials pretty much resembles to xpath. So you need to change find_element_by_css_selector to find_element_by_xpath. So effectively, the line of code will be:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[text()='Download App']")

As an alternative,

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(., 'App')]")