Getting WebElement by Text using XPath in Selenium test

Question

I would like to find any WebElement based on text using XPath.

WebElement that I am interested to find,

Its HTML,

Basically my WebElement that I am trying to retrieve by Text contains an input element.

I currently use,

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Own Hotel']"));

which does not find the WebElement above, but it usually works to retrieve all other web elements.

Even,

By.xpath("//*[contains(text(),'Own Hotel')]")

did not give me any results. Although I am interested in exact text match.

I am looking for a way to find web element by text immaterial of the elements that are present inside the web element. If text matches, it should return the WebElement.

Thanks!

Answer 1

It seems text is wrapped inside a label and not input. Try this

driver.findElement(By.xpath(".//label[text()[normalize-space() = 'Own Hotel']]"));

There is nice explanation about this xpath pattern here

Answer 2

In the HTML below:

The innerText Own Hotel within the <input> node contains a lot of white-space characters in the beginning as well at the end. Due to the presence of these leading and trailing white-space characters you can't use the location path text() as:

text() selects all text node children of the context node

---

As an alternative, you need to use the String Function string normalize-space(string?) as follows:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[normalize-space()='Own Hotel']"));

---

However, it would a better idea to make your search a bit more granular adding the tagName and preferably an unque attribute as follows:

• Using tagName and normalize-space():

  driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[normalize-space()='Own Hotel']"));
  

• Using tagName, and normalize-space():

  driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@name='ownHotel' and normalize-space()='Own Hotel']"));
  

---

References

you can find a couple of relevant discussions using normalize-space() in:

• How to click on a link with trailing white-space characters on a web page using Selenium?
• How to locate and click the element when the innerText contains leading and trailing white-space characters using Selenium and Python
• How to click on the button when the textContext contains leading and trailing white-space characters using Selenium and Python