如何最好地选择正确的元素（Python 3，Selenium）

Question

I'm trying to select a particular element from a page using Python 3 and Selenium.

The page consists of a long list (hundreds of items) that are all formatted just like this:

The html for this table looks like this:

And when I expand the element for the particular item I'm trying to click on, it looks like this (link obscured for privacy):

What I have been doing so far is to search for the element I need using

titleField = 'Zombie Apocalypse'   
searchBuilder = "//*[contains(text(), '" + titleField + "')]"
searchForBook = browser.find_elements_by_xpath(searchBuilder)
searchForBook[0].click()

which works some of the time. I'm running into problems when there are two items with that same name, or if there is an apostrophe in the title, and sometimes I can't figure out why it didn't work at all.

Is there a better way to select an individual element out of that table than the way I'm using? I will have the title of the item ahead of time, but not the ID number. The ID number is the information I'm trying to scrape.

I'm also okay with it if the search returns the URL of the item, because the ID number is contained in that URL, so I can just pull it from there. But the title isn't in the URL, so I didn't know how to search for it.

Answer 1

You should quote the text before inserting it in the XPath expression. This will encode appropriately yoyr string for xpath expressions. Note that "quoteattr"ed stings include surrounding ' or " .

from xml.sax.saxutils import quoteattr
titleField = quoteattr('Zombie Apocalypse')  # But may contain XML markup chars
searchBuilder = "//*[contains(text(), " + titleField + ")]"
searchForBook = browser.find_elements_by_xpath(searchBuilder)
searchForBook[0].click()