XPATH找不到Web上包含的文本-使用contains（text（））

Question

On this website https://classicdb.ch/?quest=788

I tried:

driver.find_element_by_xpath(
                "//div[contains(text(), 'Start')]").text

It finds the element and it returns

'Start: Kaltunk'

However when I try to find the element that contains "End" it doesn't finds anything.

driver.find_element_by_xpath(
                "//div[contains(text(), 'End')]").text

Why is this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Try with the below xpath.

//table//div[contains(.,'End:')]

Screenshot:

Explanation: Edit 1

First of all let's see how many text() nodes are present under the target div .

So the div have 3 text nodes.

Let me elaborate the original xpath used by OP.

//div[contains(text(), 'End')]
 ^div present anywhere in the document
     ^which contains
               ^the **first** text() node with string value as `End`

When contains() is given as its first argument (in div[argument] ), it takes the string value of the first node, but End appears in the second text node, not the first. That's the reason why the xpath did not worked.

We have 2 options to handle this.

1) using text() as the first argument - By that way it will get all text nodes under current context and then use contains() as a condition to check for the text() value that will match any text() node whose value contains End as shown below.

//div[text()[contains(., 'End')]]
^div present any where in the document
     ^which have text() node
             ^ that contains 'End`

Check the below screenshot:

By this time, you would got a question then why the first xpath ( //div[contains(text(), 'Start')] ) used by OP worked?

If you look at the text() nodes associated in the div, Start text is present in the 1st text() node itself, that's the reason why he was able to use that xpath.

2) Using . to check in current node context In simple terms when you say . it will check in the entire current element context for the End .

//div[contains(.,'End')]

If you don't limit the scopt to //table (at the beginning of the xpath) you will get 5 divs as the ancestor divs of the original div which have this text also be matched with the xpath. So limit the scope to check with in the table like `//table//div[contains(.,'End')]