How to click on element with text in Puppeteer

Question

Is there any method (didn't find in API) or solution to click on element with text?

For example I have html:

<div class="elements">
    <button>Button text</button>
    <a href=#>Href text</a>
    <div>Div text</div>
</div>

And I want to click on element in which text is wrapped (click on button inside .elements), like:

Page.click('Button text', '.elements')

Answer 1

Short answer

This XPath expression will query a button which contains the text "Button text":

const [button] = await page.$x("//button[contains(., 'Button text')]");
if (button) {
    await button.click();
}

To also respect the <div class="elements"> surrounding the buttons, use the following code:

const [button] = await page.$x("//div[@class='elements']/button[contains(., 'Button text')]");

Explanation

To explain why using the text node (text()) is wrong in some cases, let's look at an example:

<div>
    <button>Start End</button>
    <button>Start <em>Middle</em> End</button>
</div>

First, let's check the results when using contains(text(), 'Text'):

• //button[contains(text(), 'Start')] will return both two nodes (as expected)
• //button[contains(text(), 'End')] will only return one nodes (the first) as text() returns a list with two texts (Start and End), but contains will only check the first one
• //button[contains(text(), 'Middle')] will return no results as text() does not include the text of child nodes

Here are the XPath expressions for contains(., 'Text'), which works on the element itself including its child nodes:

• //button[contains(., 'Start')] will return both two buttons
• //button[contains(., 'End')] will again return both two buttons
• //button[contains(., 'Middle')] will return one (the last button)

So in most cases, it makes more sense to use the . instead of text() in an XPath expression.

Answer 2

You may use a XPath selector with page.$x(expression):

const linkHandlers = await page.$x("//a[contains(text(), 'Some text')]");

if (linkHandlers.length > 0) {
  await linkHandlers[0].click();
} else {
  throw new Error("Link not found");
}

Check out clickByText in this gist for a complete example. It takes care of escaping quotes, which is a bit tricky with XPath expressions.