find List Item based on known string

Question

I'm playing around with booking.com as I teach myself selenium / python. I'm trying to select a currency based on a known string e.g. 'USD'.

I'm able to click the currency icon to open the currency selection modal but then when I try to say find element where text = 'USD', I get:

selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: invalid selector: An invalid or illegal selector was specified

1. Here is the list item for 'USD':

<li class="ccff2b4c43 ea27cffb06"><button data-testid="selection-item" type="button" class="fc63351294 ea925ef36a bf97d4018a ae8177da1f cddb75f1fd"><div class="a1b3f50dcd a1f3ecff04 b2fe1a41c3 db7f07f643 d19ba76520"><div class="b1e6dd8416 aacd9d0b0a"><span class="cf67405157">U.S. Dollar<div class=" ea1163d21f">USD</div></span></div><div class=""></div></div></button></li>

2. Here is my known string I'm trying to search for:

currency = 'USD'

3. Here is my attempt at trying to find (then select) this string in the HTML:

selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, f'//span[text()={currency}]')
selected_currency_element.click()

I assume I don't need to read this modal's entire unordered list into an array then loop through it to find the string? Or do I?

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 17 '23 at 16:45

0

Couple of things to rectify.

The used syntax is for XPATH and you have used CSS_SELECTOR need to change to XPATH

selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.XPATH, f'//span[text()={currency}]')

If you see the node USD is inside a DIV tag of parent SPAN So your xpath should be like selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.XPATH, f'//span[.//div[text()="{currency}"]]')

answered Feb 17 '23 at 16:45

KunduK

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Thanks all for your help. This works well now, with KunduK's syntax being 100%. Please correct me if I misunderstand but my takeaway from your collective responses is that By.XPATH seems to be the preferred locator type for locating innerHTML within nested div / span elements. Cheers! – hal9kaye Feb 18 '23 at 14:54

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 17 '23 at 18:59

Instead of using the abbreviation, I used the long name. This works pretty good. By the way, I use Firefox as my browser

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium import webdriver

def change_currenecy(country):
    
    dvr = webdriver.Firefox()
    dvr.get("https://www.booking.com/")
    dvr.find_elements(By.XPATH, "//span[contains(text(),'USD')]")[0].click()
    dvr.find_elements(By.XPATH, f"//span[contains(text(),'{country}')]")[0].click()
    
    
change_currenecy("Thai Baht")

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 17 '23 at 22:31

You need to take care of a couple of things here:

Though you mentioed By.CSS_SELECTOR but the value is of a xpath. So you need to change the locator strategy as:
```
selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.XPATH, f'xpath_value')
```
The desired text USD is within the descendant <div> of it's parent <span>, so you need to go a step deeper.

Solution

Your effective line of code will be:

currency = 'USD'
selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.XPATH, f'//span//div[text()={currency}]')
selected_currency_element.click()

find List Item based on known string

3 Answers3

Solution