How to select nodes using find_elemets_by_xpath() with Selenium and Python

Question

I use find_elements_by_xpath to know if keywords exists

driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//*[contains(text(), "' + str(key) + '")]') 

when keyword = 0.5 HR which returns 0.5 HR (correctly)

when keyword = 5 HR which still returns both 5 HR and 0.5 HR (wrong, 0.5 HR is not 5 HR)

Is it possible to avoid?

Answer 1

I'm imagine you have following code snippet:

<div>
    <div>0.5 HR</div>
    <div>5 HR</div>
</div>

If you query with contains function with value 5 HR like this:

//*[contains(text(), "5 HR")]

Sure it will return 2, because there are indeed 2 elements that contain 5 HR text.

May you want query with exact value, so you can't use contains function.

Use equal = :

driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//*[text()="' + str(key) + '"]')

Answer 2

To start with, using contains(text(), "sometext") may make the xpath expression a bit flaky. I would have used either text() or contains(string, string)

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text()

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

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contains()

contains() function returns true if the first argument string contains the second argument string, and otherwise returns false.

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An example

Consider the example below:

• HTML:

  <ul>
      <li>0.5 HR</li>
      <li>5 HR</li>
  </ul>
  

• To select only the node with text as 0.5 HR you need to use:

  //key = 0.5 HR
  driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//li[text()='" + str(key) + "']") 
  

• To select only the node with text as 5 HR you need to use:

  //key = 5 HR
  driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//li[text()='" + str(key) + "']") 
  

• To select both the nodes with text as 0.5 HR and 5 HR you need to use:

  //key = 5 HR
  driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//li[contains(., '" + str(key) + "')]")
  

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Reference

You can find a detailed discussion in:

• How does dot(.) in xpath to take multiple form in identifying an element and matching a text