I want to find any element with a given text on my page, but when I pass it to find without an element it gives me back an error
find(material.attachment_filename) #material.attachment_filename is "01. pain killer.mp3"
But if i do:
find('a',text: material.attachment_filename)
It works fine, and the given error is:
Selenium::WebDriver::Error::InvalidSelectorError:
Given css selector expression "01. pain killer.mp3" is invalid: SyntaxError: An invalid or illegal string was specified
Capybara's find takes 3 arguments (a Capybara selector type, a locator string, and an options hash). If the selector type isn't specified it defaults to :css which means the locator string needs to be a CSS selector.
This means that find(material.attachment_filename) in your case is equivalent to
find(:css, "01. pain killer.mp3")
which will raise an error as you've seen because "01. pain killer.mp3" isn't valid CSS. If you want to find any element containing the text you could do something like
find('*', text: "01. pain killer.mp3")
which will find any element containing the text, however that's also going to find all the ancestor elements too since they also contain the text, So what you'd probably want is to use a regex to make sure the element contains only that content
find('*', /\A#{Regexp.escape(material.attachment_filename)}\z/)
which should be interpreted as
find('*', /\A01\. pain killer\.mp3\z/)
Note: That is going to be pretty slow if your page has anything more than simple content on it because it means transferring all the elements from selenium to capybara to check the text content.
A more performant solution would be to use XPath which has support for finding elements by text content (CSS does not)
find(:xpath, XPath.descendant[XPath.string.n.is(material.attachment_filename)]) #using the XPath library - contains (assuming Capybara.exact == false)
find(:xpath, XPath.descendant[XPath.string.n.is(material.attachment_filename)], exact: true) #using the XPath library - equals (you could also pass exact:false to force contains)
If the text won't contain XPath special characters (ex. apostrophes) that need escaping, you can use a string to define the XPath:
find(:xpath, ".//*[contains(., '#{material.attachment_filename}')]") #contains the text
find(:xpath, ".//*[text()='#{material.attachment_filename}']") #equals the text
If the element is actually a link you're looking for though then you would probably want to use
find_link("01. pain killer.mp3")
or
find(:link, "01. pain killer.mp3")
Related
I'm trying to find the xpath for an element that contains three dots instead of text. Once I expand the element by clicking on arrow in DOM model html it returns the text.
The following xpath returns nothing unfortunately:
//button[contains(text(),'Pending')]
What's the right solution?
The text content of that element is not a three dots but Pending (). You see the ... only because there is no room to present the text there until you expand the element. So, generally this //button[contains(text(),'Pending')] should work.
You can also try this XPath expression:
//button[contains(.,'Pending')]
It means "a button element with any attribute containing Pending value"
It is more general and should work.
To understand why //button[contains(text(),'Pending')] did not work see this post or this. There are more explanations about this.
I am working on some robot where I need to use xpath of some particular element which has keyword "label" in its address, so whatever I am writing after keyword label its robot is taking it as argument of label.
here, it's taking the "by" as argument of label.
selenium.click search ‴/html/body/app-root/div[2]/app-rpa1/div/div[2]/form/div/div[1]/rpa1-field/div/label‴ by xpath
G1ANT has some issues with the syntax colouring. Don't worry about the by argument being coloured as label, it will be parsed correctly and your script should work fine.
I encounter a problem when playing around xpath selector.
response.xpath('//*[text()="Revenue"]/text()/.')
response.xpath('//*[text()="Revenue"]/text()').xpath('.')
I was expecting two codes above output the same thing. The first one works fine,but the second one returns an empty list.
This is a known issue, there is a feature request to get selectors of text to behave as any other selectors (parsel #130).
So this is a bit of a performance question regarding Selenium Webdriver (Chromedriver) and Capybara.
I have some react-select dropdowns with quite a bit of data in them. For some reason the react-selects take a VERY VERY long time to pick out the option in them. The code is pretty simple and I grabbed it from here: https://github.com/JedWatson/react-select/issues/832
But it basically comes down to:
page.find('.Select-control').click
page.find('.Select-option', text: 'the text').click
Thing is, this works fine. But it takes an extremely long time (Upwards of a minute a dropdown). Now...in Capybaras defense these dropdowns have a LOT of options to select from, so I thought selecting from the top-most item would be the fastest, but that doesn't seem to affect it.
Does Capybara/Selenium hold the "options" in a different sorted list somewhere or something? Since i'd assume selecting from a top option in the dropdown would be faster, but it doesn't seem to be?
Generally, when using the text option, find first finds all the elements that match using the locator with the current selector type. In your case your selector type is defaulting to :css, and the locator is .Select-option. So Capybara will find all elements with the class Select-option and then it will go through each of those elements comparing the text to see what matches (and checking visibility), but it will have to compare all of them to make sure the selector isn't ambiguous.
One way to speed that up would be to use first with a minimum option
page.first('.Select-option', text: 'the text', minimum: 1).click
which can skip some of the text and visibility checking since it doesn't have to worry about ambiguous elements. Another solution would be to skip the text option altogether and write it into an XPath along the lines of
page.find(:xpath, XPath.css('.Select-option')[XPath.string.n.is('the text')]).click # Haven't verified this is 100% correct but it should be close
If you're doing this a lot in your app you may want to consider creating a custom selector for this
Capybara.add_selector(:react_option) do
xpath do |locator|
XPath.css('.Select-option')[XPath.string.n.is(locator)]
end
# You can add other filters in here - see https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara/blob/master/lib/capybara/selector.rb
end
which would then allow you to do
page.find(:react_option, 'the text').click
Note, if you can limit the element types it will also make the query more efficient, so if all of the elements are <li> elements you might want to do something like
XPath.css('li.Select-option')[XPath.string.n.is(locator)]
My question is about specifics of using dot and text() in XPath. For example, following find_element lines returns same element:
driver.get('http://stackoverflow.com/')
driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[text()="Ask Question"]')
driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[.="Ask Question"]')
So what is the difference? What are the benefits and drawbacks of using . and text()?
There is a difference between . and text(), but this difference might not surface because of your input document.
If your input document looked like (the simplest document one can imagine given your XPath expressions)
Example 1
<html>
<a>Ask Question</a>
</html>
Then //a[text()="Ask Question"] and //a[.="Ask Question"] indeed return exactly the same result. But consider a different input document that looks like
Example 2
<html>
<a>Ask Question<other/>
</a>
</html>
where the a element also has a child element other that follows immediately after "Ask Question". Given this second input document, //a[text()="Ask Question"] still returns the a element, while //a[.="Ask Question"] does not return anything!
This is because the meaning of the two predicates (everything between [ and ]) is different. [text()="Ask Question"] actually means: return true if any of the text nodes of an element contains exactly the text "Ask Question". On the other hand, [.="Ask Question"] means: return true if the string value of an element is identical to "Ask Question".
In the XPath model, text inside XML elements can be partitioned into a number of text nodes if other elements interfere with the text, as in Example 2 above. There, the other element is between "Ask Question" and a newline character that also counts as text content.
To make an even clearer example, consider as an input document:
Example 3
<a>Ask Question<other/>more text</a>
Here, the a element actually contains two text nodes, "Ask Question" and "more text", since both are direct children of a. You can test this by running //a/text() on this document, which will return (individual results separated by ----):
Ask Question
-----------------------
more text
So, in such a scenario, text() returns a set of individual nodes, while . in a predicate evaluates to the string concatenation of all text nodes. Again, you can test this claim with the path expression //a[.='Ask Questionmore text'] which will successfully return the a element.
Finally, keep in mind that some XPath functions can only take one single string as an input. As LarsH has pointed out in the comments, if such an XPath function (e.g. contains()) is given a sequence of nodes, it will only process the first node and silently ignore the rest.
There is big difference between dot (".") and text() :-
The dot (".") in XPath is called the "context item expression" because it refers to the context item. This could be match with a node (such as an element, attribute, or text node) or an atomic value (such as a string, number, or boolean). While text() refers to match only element text which is in string form.
The dot (".") notation is the current node in the DOM. This is going to be an object of type Node while Using the XPath function text() to get the text for an element only gets the text up to the first inner element. If the text you are looking for is after the inner element you must use the current node to search for the string and not the XPath text() function.
For an example :-
<a href="something.html">
<img src="filename.gif">
link
</a>
Here if you want to find anchor a element by using text link, you need to use dot ("."). Because if you use //a[contains(.,'link')] it finds the anchor a element but if you use //a[contains(text(),'link')] the text() function does not seem to find it.
Hope it will help you..:)
enter image description here
The XPath text() function locates elements within a text node while dot (.) locate elements inside or outside a text node. In the image description screenshot, the XPath text() function will only locate Success in DOM Example 2. It will not find success in DOM Example 1 because it's located between the tags.
In addition, the text() function will not find success in DOM Example 3 because success does not have a direct relationship to the element . Here's a video demo explaining the difference between text() and dot (.) https://youtu.be/oi2Q7-0ZIBg