How do I escape an apostrophe in my XPath text query with Perl and Selenium?

Question

I have an XPath query which needs to match some text in a span attribute, as follows:

my $perl_query = qq(span[text\(\)='It's a problem']);

$sel->click_ok($perl_query);

Where the text has no apostrophe there is no problem.

I've tried the following instead of 'It's a problem':

'It\'s a problem'
'It&apos\;s a problem'
'It\${apos}s a problem'  #some thread on Stackoverflow suggested that this was a solution implemented by Selenium, but it doesn't work.

Any ideas?

On a different note, if I can't solve this, I'd be happy enough matching 'a problem' but not sure how to do regex matching in XPath with Selenium.

Thanks for any pointers

Answer 1

It's an XPath problem rather than the Perl problem.

The problem was discussed and answered here in great detail: http://kushalm.com/the-perils-of-xpath-expressions-specifically-escaping-quotes (broken link)

In a nutshell, modify your xquery to assemble the quote-containing string using concat()

my $perl_query = qq(span[text\(\)=concat("It","'","s a problem"]);

Answer 2

A couple of suggestions; hopefully at least one of them will work:

my $perl_query = qq!span[text()='It\\'s a problem']!;
my $perl_query = qq!span[text()="It's a problem"]!;

Answer 3

I just had the same problem and google didn't give me a satisfied solution.

I tried to substring this: value=' - ending with an Apostrophe.

My XPath that works look like:

"substring-after(., concat('value=', ''''))"

So four Apostrophes in a row.