How can I use XPath to find an element with a title that contains single and double quotes?

Question

I have some Python/Selenium code that finds an element with the specified title text using XPath:

tab_element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(lambda x: x.find_element_by_xpath('//a[@title="' + tab_title + '"]'))

It works fine in most cases, but it fails when it encounters an element with a title that contains double quotes.

<p title="that'll be the &quot;dayg&quot;">That'll be the "day"</p>

So, that leaves me with two questions:

How can I make it work with title values that contain double quotes?
How can I make it work with any title value, such as ones that contain both double and single quotes?

As pointed by Michael Key, this should work for both single and double quotes :`//p[contains(@title,concat('"',''))]|//p[contains(@title,"'")]`. First part is for double, second for single. — E.Wiest, Mar 10 '20 at 11:20

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 10 '20 at 07:03

I ended up using Elias's XPath escaping function from this thread.

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

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

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

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 10 '20 at 09:01

For XPath 1.0 the rule is:

(a) a string literal can't contain the mark used as the string delimiter; the only way around that is to form the string using concat(), for example concat("'", '"', "'") is the string of three characters '"'.

(b) if a string literal contains a character that has special meaning in the host language (e.g. " in Java or & in XML) then it needs to be escaped using the host language escaping conventions (\" in Java, & in XML).

In XPath 2.0 you can get around (a) by doubling: for example """" is a string literal representing a string of length one containing a double-quotes character. You can also get around both (a) and (b) by using the codepoints-to-string() function.

How can I use XPath to find an element with a title that contains single and double quotes?

2 Answers2