How to select an element from Span tag using xpath or css selector

Question

I'm trying to automate process of pinging a person on a messenger on selecting the messenger name(Nayan)

Please find the Html code

<div class="Presence__text">
<span class="Presence__nameText">Nayan<span class="Presence__contactFlagIndicator"></span>

as text element present inside the span tag is unique (Nayan), i want to select based on that text element.

Problem statement :Unable to select an element using text present in span tag

I wanted to open the text of "Nayan" using xpath, can anyone help me solving this problem please.

Prophet · Accepted Answer · 2023-01-29 12:35:10Z

1

XPath can be used to locate elements based on their text content.
Accordingly to presented here HTML the following XPath can be used:

"//span[contains(text(),'Nayan')]"

Selenium command using this XPath in Java (you didn't mention the language you are using, but accordingly to your previous questions I see you are using Java) can be as following:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[contains(text(),'Nayan')]"));

In case "Nayan" text is unique it's always better to use contains rather to use equals method since web element may contain extra spaces.
I mean when possible [contains(text(),'Nayan')] is better to use than [text()='Nayan']
Also, since you are using Selenium it can be Xpath 1.0 only since Selenium not supporting Xpath 2.0 and higher, it supports XPath 1.0 only

edited Jan 29, 2023 at 12:35

answered Jan 29, 2023 at 12:26

Prophet

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7 Comments

nayansFosgit Over a year ago

thanks, tried the above two cases but i got following exception org.openqa.selenium.InvalidSelectorException: invalid selector: Unable to locate an element with the xpath expression //span[contains(text()='Nayan')] because of the following error: SyntaxError: Failed to execute 'evaluate' on 'Document': The string '//span[contains(text()='Nayan')]' is not a valid XPath expression.

Prophet Over a year ago

It's not what I wrote. //span[contains(text(),'Nayan')]. Not //span[contains(text()='Nayan')]. = is not used with contains

nayansFosgit Over a year ago

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[contains(text(),'Nayan')]")); using this code line iam getting NoSuchElementException @Prophet

Prophet Over a year ago

Can you share a link to the page you working on? Maybe you are missing a delay? Maybe page need to be scrolled? iframe? many possible issues

nayansFosgit Over a year ago

actually its a private page, even if i share you wont be able to view it sorry hope you got it

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