Selenium Python: find_element_by_css_selector() using :contains()

Question

In Selenium on Python, I'm trying to select an element using

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.find_element_by_css_selector("td:contains('hello world')")

Which gives me the error:

>>>> selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: u'An invalid or illegal string was specified'

I can select elements using many different CSS selectors this way, but using :contains() always seems to throw an error. NOTE: I get the same error when i try to use:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//td[contains(text(),'hello world')]")

Please advise. Thanks!

EDIT: SOLVED!

Problem solved! Thank you so much for your help! I had two significant mistakes: 1.) I thought that :contains() was an accepted css3 selector (turns out it is not part of the current spec, which is why i couldn't select that way) 2.) The xpath selector would have been fine except that I was using a parser that assumed xpath would never have any spaces in it, so it split the arguments by spaces. Therefore, when i passed in the xpath selector

//td[contains(text(),'hello world']

the parser was truncated it at the space after 'hello' so the xpath selector looked like

//td[contains(text(),'hello

which clearly would throw an error. So i need to adjust my parsing to properly read my xpath selector.

Thank you again for all of your fast, helpful answers!

cssselect has support for :contains() pseudo-selector but it refers to an early CSS3 draft that was removed (pythonhosted.org/cssselect/#supported-selectors). I'm not aware of other projects supporting this pseuso-selector — paul trmbrth
– paul trmbrth, Commented Aug 28, 2013 at 15:08
@pault. that is jQery one - api.jquery.com/contains-selector . Selenium doesn't support that jQuery one.. — Arup Rakshit
– Arup Rakshit, Commented Aug 28, 2013 at 15:14
@Babai, the contains selector that jQuery has actually comes from Sizzle, not jQuery. — Arran
– Arran, Commented Aug 28, 2013 at 15:32

falsetru · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-28 15:35:27Z

6

Replace find_element_by_xpath_selector with find_element_by_xpath (There is no find_element_by_xpath_selector method):

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
...
driver = driver.find_element_by_xpath(u"//td[contains(text(), 'hello')]")

COMPLETE EXAMPLE

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('http://python.org')
link = driver.find_element_by_xpath(u'//a[contains(text(), "Download")]')
link.click()

edited Aug 28, 2013 at 15:35

answered Aug 28, 2013 at 15:02

falsetru

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9 Comments

Jeremy Moritz Over a year ago

good catch! I hadn't made that particular mistake in my actual code though (just in my Stack Overflow question). I updated the question accordingly. Still the same error though.

falsetru Over a year ago

@JeremyMoritz, Please show your actual code with the url you're dealing with.

Arup Rakshit Over a year ago

@falsetru what is this br.find_element_by_xpath(u"//td[contains(text(), 'hello')]") ? what is br ?

falsetru Over a year ago

@Babai, It was my mistake, I fixed that. br comes from my spike solution. Thank you for comment.

Jeremy Moritz Over a year ago

@falsetru Here's the error I'm getting when i use the xpath method: selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: u'The given selector //h3[contains(text(), is either invalid or does not result in a WebElement. The following error occurred:\nInvalidSelectorError: Unable to locate an element with the xpath expression //h3[contains(text(), because of the following error:\n[Exception... "The expression is not a legal expression." code: "12" nsresult: "0x805b0033 (SyntaxError)"

|

Arup Rakshit · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-28 15:15:52Z

2

You are doing wrong way. You need to create first a driver object as below:

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Then navigate to the required url as below:

driver.get("http://www.python.org")

Then on that driver object need to call the required method. There is no contains CSS Selectors. You can go ahead by this method find_element_by_xpath as below :

elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//td[contains(text(), 'hello')]")

edited Aug 28, 2013 at 15:15

answered Aug 28, 2013 at 15:07

Arup Rakshit

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Comments

KINZ · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-29 07:24:27Z

1

Instead of

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("td:contains('hello world')")

you can use this option too:

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("td*='hello world'")

Note: * in css_selector works same as contains in XPath

Reference: https://saucelabs.com/resources/articles/selenium-tips-css-selectors

edited Jan 29, 2019 at 7:24

answered Jan 29, 2019 at 6:50

KINZ

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2 Comments

Jeremy Moritz Over a year ago

Thank you for drawing attention to this selector! Unfortunately, it doesn't work the way you're claiming here. If you read your referenced webpage carefully, you'll see that *= (like ^= and $=) is used for selecting ATTRIBUTES of elements, NOT the INNER TEXT of those elements.

KINZ Over a year ago

Thank you @JeremyMoritz for clearing the confusion.Yes you are right is works for attribute and not text.

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