Xpath doesn't detect text with nbsp

Question

<tr>
 <td align="left" width="200">
  <p>Document Uploaded:&nbsp;Yes</p>
 </td>
</tr>

I'm unable to locate the element with   in the text. The below XPath expression does not not work and I've tried so many other suggestions online but have not been successful yet. FYI: I need the entire text not just a substring of it.

//p[contains(text(), 'Document Uploaded: Yes')]

Does this answer your question? [Using XPATH to search text containing ](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/247135/using-xpath-to-search-text-containing-nbsp) — Nowhere Man, Oct 06 '20 at 19:35
Have you provided the complete XML document or just a fragment of it? Please, provide a complete, but minimal in length document that still exhibits the reported problem. I suspect that the failure to select the wanted element may be due to namespace issues. — Dimitre Novatchev, Oct 08 '20 at 00:11
Can you, please explain what do you mean by this: "FYI: I need the entire text not just a snippet of it."? The provided XPath expression selects one (in your case) or more `
` elements, not text-nodes. Also, if you are specifying in the predicate the string `"'Document Uploaded: Yes'"`, then you already know "the entire text"... So what do you actually mean by that? Very confused! — Dimitre Novatchev, Oct 16 '20 at 00:38

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 06 '20 at 19:25

1

Try using

//p[contains(text(), 'Document Uploaded:&#160;Yes')]

  is the Numeric character reference for the Named character reference   (See Wikipedia). It can also be used in a DOCTYPE declaration at the beginning of an XML/XSLT document to make   usuable:

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [
<!ENTITY nbsp  "&#160;" >
]>

answered Oct 06 '20 at 19:25

zx485

28,498
28
50
59

I guess the handling depends on the XPath-Parser. I tested it with `xsltproc` and `Saxon9`, and there it works. – zx485 Oct 06 '20 at 19:46

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 08 '20 at 00:05

Use:

//p[. = 'Document Uploaded:&#xA0;Yes']

XSLT - based verification:

This XSLT transformation just evaluates the above XPath expression and outputs the result of the evaluation:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:copy-of select=
    "//p[. = 'Document Uploaded:&#xA0;Yes']"/>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When applied on the provided XML document:

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [
<!ENTITY nbsp  "&#160;" >
]>
<tr>
 <td align="left" width="200">
  <p>Document Uploaded:&nbsp;Yes</p>
 </td>
</tr>

the wanted, correct result is produced:

<p>Document Uploaded: Yes</p>

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 07 '20 at 08:50

Odd one this! The other answers mentioned above should word.

An alternative solution is to work around the character:

//p[contains(text(), 'Document Uploaded:')][contains(text(), 'Yes')]

Use an xpath that looks for an element that contains both string you need. If you need it to be more rigid, you can use starts-with and ends-with.

Another approach is don't find this item by text but rather get the element and process it in Java. I can't give a working example as I would need to see more html but the process would be:

Find an fixed anchor point e.g. something else in your html table you can identify easily
Create an xpath from that anchor with following-sibling:: or parent:: or following:: (you get the idea) - whatever to find this Document Uploaded: element
set that as your xpath in java with findElement.
In java: myElement.getText()

I think Selenium is smart enough to strip out the nbsp character - but even if it does not you'll still have a text string confirming your document upload status.

Xpath doesn't detect text with nbsp

3 Answers3