Selenium WebDriver - select table cell by inner text - C# .NET

Question

I am trying to grab one or more table cells that contain a particular string. I am not able to accomplish this with

var tableCells = table.FindElements(By.CssSelector("td:contains('my partial text')"));

What is the correct css selector text to use here?

I've also tried the following:

var tableCells = table.FindElements(By.TagName("td")).Where(tableCell => tableCell.Contains("my partial text"));

but it is extremely slow.

Ross Patterson · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-13 15:44:00Z

1

There is no such CSS selector as :contains(). It was a proposal that was discarded years ago.

The reason table.FindElements(By.TagName("td")).Where(tableCell => tableCell.Contains("my partial text")); is slow should be at least partly obvious - you're asking WebDriver to find every table cell in the document, and then iterate over them all.

You can do this much more efficiently using an XPath locator, something like table.FindElements(By.xpath("//td[contains(.,'my partial text')]")). This is exactly what it looks like - the XPath equivalent of your attempted CSS locator.

answered Jan 13, 2013 at 15:44

Ross Patterson

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6 Comments

lintmouse Over a year ago

Hey, thanks for the response. I read that css selector is more efficient than xpath. Is that your impression? Should I generally stick with css selector and only use xpath when there isn't an equivalent like with this example?

Igor Khrol Over a year ago

"I read that css selector is more efficient than xpath." - the only reason to have css selectors instead of xpath is the fact that for previous selenium versions (Selenium RC) XPath was extremely slow in IE. For now you can freely use XPath.

Ross Patterson Over a year ago

@IgorKhrol is correct. Benchmarks have proved that XPath and CSS are similarly efficient in WebDriver.

JimEvans Over a year ago

At the risk of being pedantic, I have to point out that XPath selectors in some versions of IE can still be dramatically slower than comparable CSS selectors. This IE performance discrepancy is not limited to RC; it affects WebDriver as well.

Ross Patterson Over a year ago

I know better than to argue with @JimEvans on this. Nobody knows the WebDriver IE code better than Jim - he wrote it. I read another WebDriver committer making claims of nearly-equivalent performance for CSS and XPath, but those may have only been for recent IE version.

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