How to escape single quote in xpath 1.0 in selenium for python

Question

I have the following code line used in selenium python script:

from selenium import webdriver

driver.find_element_by_xpath(u"//span[text()='" + cat2 + "']").click()

cat2 is variable from a database list that i get like this:

db = Database()
sql = "SELECT * FROM missing
listeproduit = db.select(sql)
for record in listeproduit:
    cat2       = record[6]

The probleme is when the variable contain a text like this:

cat2 = Debimetre d'air

Then the script don't works because it's an illegal xpath expression.

From my search, i understand that it's a problem with escaping the single quote in my variable cat2

From this answers :Escape single quote in XPath with Nokogiri?

They suggest to use concat() xpath function, but how to use it in my case ? Thanks for your help.

Cheers

Answer 1

In XPath 1.0, which is used by browsers and therefore by Selenium, there is no native way of escaping string literals (which was remedied in XPath 2.0). A few workarounds are mentioned by this poster, which includes:

• First off, make sure you understand the difference between escaping in Python, which is possible, and escaping within the XPath expression
• Then, if you simply need a single quote, surround it by double quotes, and vice versa
• Then, if one string literal contains both double and single quotes, use something like concat('"', "Here's Johnny", '"', ", said Johnny."), which combines to the literal: "Here's Johnny", said Johnny..

In your case, this would work:

driver.find_element_by_xpath(u"//span[text()=\"" + cat2 + "\"]").click()

Another way around this is to set an XPath variable to contain the value of your string literal, which helps in readability. But I couldn't find how to do it with the web drivers for Selenium, which typically means there is no such method available.