How do I find an element that contains specific text in Selenium WebDriver (Python)?

Answer #1:

Try the following:

driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'My Button')]")

Answer #2:

You could try an XPath expression like:

'//div[contains(text(), "{0}") and @class="inner"]'.format(text)

Answer #3:

In the HTML which you have provided:

<div>My Button</div>

The text My Button is the innerHTML and have no whitespaces around it so you can easily use text() as follows:

my_element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[text()='My Button']")

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

Text with leading/trailing spaces

In case the relevant text containing whitespaces either in the beginning:

<div>   My Button</div>

or at the end:

<div>My Button   </div>

or at both the ends:

<div> My Button </div>

In these cases you have two options:

• You can use contains() function which determines whether the first argument string contains the second argument string and returns boolean true or false as follows:

    my_element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[contains(., 'My Button')]")
  

• You can use normalize-space() function which strips leading and trailing white-space from a string, replaces sequences of whitespace characters by a single space, and returns the resulting string as follows:

    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[normalize-space()='My Button']]")
  

XPath expression for variable text

In case the text is a variable, you can use:

foo= "foo_bar"
my_element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[.='" + foo + "']")

Answer #4:

You can also use it with Page Object Pattern, e.g:

Try this code:

@FindBy(xpath = "//*[contains(text(), 'Best Choice')]")
WebElement buttonBestChoice;

Answer #5:

//* This will be looking for any HTML tag. Where if some text is common for Button and div tag and if //* is categories, it will not work as expected. If you need to select any specific then you can get it by declaring an HTML element tag. Like:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[contains(text(),'Add User')]")
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[contains(text(),'Add User')]")

Answer #6:

Interestingly virtually all answers revolve around XPath’s function contains(), neglecting the fact it is case sensitive – contrary to the OP’s ask.

If you need case insensitivity, that is achievable in XPath 1.0 (the version contemporary browsers support), though it’s not pretty – by using the translate() function. It substitutes a source character to its desired form, by using a translation table.

Constructing a table of all upper case characters will effectively transform the node’s text to its lower() form – allowing case-insensitive matching (here’s just the prerogative):

[
  contains(
    translate(text(), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'),
    'my button'
  )
]
# will match a source text like "mY bUTTon"

The full Python call:

driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[contains(translate(text(), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ?', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz?'), 'my button')]")

Naturally this approach has its drawbacks – as given, it’ll work only for Latin text; if you want to cover Unicode characters – you’ll have to add them to the translation table. I’ve done that in the sample above – the last character is the Cyrillic symbol "?".

And if we lived in a world where browsers supported XPath 2.0 and up (?, but not happening any time soon ??), we could having used the functions lower-case() (yet, not fully locale-aware), and matches (for regex searches, with the case-insensitive ('i') flag).

Answer #7:

Similar problem: Find <button>Advanced...</button>

Maybe this will give you some ideas (please transfer the concept from Java to Python):

wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(//
    driver.findElements(By.tagName("button")).stream().filter(i -> i.getText().equals("Advanced...")).findFirst().get())).click();

Answer #8:

wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'YourTextHere')]")));
assertNotNull(driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'YourTextHere')]")));
String yourButtonName = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'YourTextHere')]")).getAttribute("innerText");
assertTrue(yourButtonName.equalsIgnoreCase("YourTextHere"));