Finding xpath of a link using link text?

Question

In Selenium WebDriver, how to use xpath for the below HTML using Link Text ("Add New Button")

<a href="SOME URL">
 <span >
  <i class=""/>
 </span>Add New Button
</a>

I tried to inspect the element as below but all dint work

1) //a[text()='Add New Button']
2) //a[contains(text(),'Add New Button']
3) //a/span/i[text()='Add New Button']
4) //a/span/i[contains(text(),'Add New Button']

I know that 3 and 4 won't , but just tried it.

So for such a HTML DOM, How to find the link using the link text using xpath?

Answer 1

Use following xpath

 //*[contains(text(),'Add New Button')]

or

//a/i[contains(text(),'Add New Button')]

or

//a[@href='SOME URL']/i

or Using cssSelector -

a[href='SOME URL']>i

Answer 2

Some of the answers that were already given work, others don't. And I think the OP would benefit from more explanations.

Your original expression:

//a[text()='Add New Button']

Does not work because the text node that contains "Add New Button" also has a newline character at the end.

The next one:

//a[contains(text(),'Add New Button']

Does not work (leaving aside the missing parenthesis) because text() returns a sequence of nodes and a function like contains() will only evaluate the first node in the sequence. In this case, the first text node inside a only contains whitespace and is not the one that contains "Add New Button".

You can validate this claim with:

//a[contains(text()[2],'Add New Button')]

which will test whether the second text node of a contains "Add New Button" - and this expression will return the a element. But the best solution in this case is:

//a[contains(.,'Add New Button')]

. will evaluate to the so-called "string value" of an element, a concatenation of all its text nodes which will include "Add New Button".

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A solution with normalize-space() is also possible, but has nested predicates:

//a[text()[normalize-space(.) = "Add New Button"]]