Xpath of weird A element with text in the quotation marks

Question

I am trying to get the element by xPath but the text is in the quotation marks and xPath does not work..

Any ideas?

Code when opened as HTML:

<li class="help-menu-item-486 active">
<a href="javascript:void(0)" id="menuItemLink486">
<i id="id31" style="display:none" data-wicket-placeholder=""></i>
Archiv dokumentů
</a>
</li>

Code in the console:

Thank you in advance!

I even tried to add % so %Archiv% - but still no luck..

Maybe try //a[text()[contains(.,’Archiv’)]]. Reason: there are more text()-nodes in that a-element — Siebe Jongebloed, May 10 '21 at 16:06
Hi Siebe, thank you very much for your reply, unfortunately, your code did not work but the one from Forensic_07 works! — vohratom, May 11 '21 at 08:32
I assume the wrong quotes were the problem: It should have been: //a[text()[contains(.,'Archiv')]] or with double quotes //a[text()[contains(.,"Archiv")]] — Siebe Jongebloed, May 11 '21 at 09:32
Hi Siebe, yup, confirmed, the quotes were the problem, now it is working fine! :-) Thank you — vohratom, May 13 '21 at 21:00

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 10 '21 at 17:14

As noted in the linked answer above, contains() takes a single string as a first argument, but text() is a selector that returns a set of text nodes. Since contains() can't take a set, it evaluates against the first node in the set, which isn't actually the \nArchiv dokumentů\n text, but a single newline character between the a and i tags, so it doesn't match.

You can use //a[contains(., "Archiv")] to evaluate a as a string, which will use all the text in the a tag.

Hi Forensic_07 thank you! This is working! I am now a bit more experienced with xpaths thanks to you :-) — vohratom, May 11 '21 at 08:34

Xpath of weird A element with text in the quotation marks

1 Answers1