css/xpath selector to exclude the child node in the element when using selenium webdriver (java)

Question

CSS/xpath selector to get the link text excluding the text in .muted.

I have html like this:

<a href="link">
          Text
   <span class="muted"> –text</span>
</a>

When I do getText(), I get the complete text like, Text-text. Is it possible to exclude the muted subclass text ?

Tried cssSelector = "a:not([span='muted'])" doesn't work.

xpath = "//a/node()[not(name()='span')][1]"

ERROR: The result of the xpath expression "//a/node()[not(name()='span')][1]" is: [objectText]. It should be an element.

Thanks @winner_joiner. But this doesn't work. It returns an empty set. — hemanik
– hemanik, Commented May 11, 2017 at 17:23

Andersson · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-11 15:27:10Z

2

AFAIK this cannot be done with CSS selector only. You can try to use JavaScriptExecutor to get required text.

As you didn't mention programming language you use I show you example on Python:

link = driver.find_element_by_css_selector('a[href="link"]')
driver.execute_script('return arguments[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue', link)

This will return just "Text" without " -text"

answered May 11, 2017 at 15:27

Andersson

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2 Comments

hemanik Over a year ago

Thank you. This works but was looking if there is some other way as well. Probably using xpath selector or jquery ?

Andersson Over a year ago

XPath to get required text is normalize-space(//a[@href="link"]/text()), but selenium doesn't support this syntax...

Zeeshan S. · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-12 22:07:20Z

1

You cannot do this using Selenium WebDriver's API. You have to handle it in your code as follows:

// Get the entire link text
String linkText = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//a[@href='link']")).getText();

// Get the span text only
String spanText = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//a[@href='link']/span[@class='muted']")).getText();

// Replace the span text from link text and trim any whitespace
linkText.replace(spanText, "").trim();

answered May 12, 2017 at 22:07

Zeeshan S.

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1 Comment

hemanik Over a year ago

Thanks. That helps.

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