XPath is valid in Chrome but not in Selenium

Question

My challenge is to locate an element by its content which contains single-quotes. I do this successfully with vanilla JS here:

 singleQuotes = document.evaluate("//div[contains(text(), \"'quotes'\")]", document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null); singleQuotes = singleQuotes.snapshotItem(0); console.log(singleQuotes)

 <div>'quotes'</div>

However, when I use Python & Selenium to implement the same vanilla JS, the Xpath is invalid:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

window = webdriver.Chrome(service=ChromeService(ChromeDriverManager().install()))
window.get("www.someurl.com")
window.execute_script(f'''xpath = document.evaluate("//div[contains(text(), \\"'quotes'\\")]", document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);''')

I get a SyntaxError: Failed to execute 'evaluate' on 'Document': The string...is not a valid XPath expression.

(I would try & show this in a sandbox but I don't know how to).

Answer 1

I believe it's just the " getting eaten by python. Use a double \\.

Forget selenium and compare:

print(f'''xpath = document.evaluate("//div[contains(text(), \"'quotes'\")]", document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);''')

and

print(f'''xpath = document.evaluate("//div[contains(text(), \\"'quotes'\\")]", document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);''')

Answer 2

This error message...

SyntaxError: Failed to execute 'evaluate' on 'Document': The string...is not a valid XPath expression

...implies that the xpath based locator strategy you have constructed was not a valid locator.

---

Solution

You can use either of the locator strategy :

• Using the complete text 'quotes'

   singleQuotes = document.evaluate("//div[text()=\"'quotes'\"]", document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);

• Using partial text quotes

   singleQuotes = document.evaluate("//div[contains(., 'quotes')]", document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);

Answer 3

try backticks:

document.evaluate(`//div[contains(text(), "'quotes'")]`, ...)