Skip to main content

XPath and single quotes


I had tough time dealing with XPath and single quote. Though W3C recommends using ' to escape it but I never got it working, let me know if any of you get through.
Came across this blog and found that “concat” could be used in this situation.
So original XPath expression is –

//meta[@name=’DESCRIPTION’][@content=’Tester’s Test’]

This is some thing which certainly fails as single quote in “Tester’s” marks it at end of string and then XPath blows up, next trial was –

//meta[@name=’DESCRIPTION’][@content=’Tester''s Test’]

This does not work despite w3c recommendation!

And then I used concat function and split the string as –

concat(‘Tester’,”’”,’s Test’)

NOTICE that single quote is kept in double quote while other characters are kept in single quotes.
So XPath looks as –

//meta[@name=’DESCRIPTION’][@content=concat(‘Tester’,”’”,’s Test’)]

And this works charm.



Labels:

Comments

  1. DanielMay 19, 2011 at 1:39 AM

    Thanks for the post, it's helping me out.

    I'm trying to write a similar Xpath, in Google Docs, to pull only the meta descriptions off web pages.

    I feel your example is getting me close...but I'm not there yet!

    Any ideas on what it would look like?

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. tarun kMay 19, 2011 at 5:22 AM

    Glad you liked it.

    For meta tags you could use XPath like -

    //title[text() = 'title text']

    //meta[@name='keywords'][@content='jobs, web, testing']

    But I suggest to use CSS insead..

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

No spam only genuine comments :)

Popular posts from this blog

Selenium Tutorial: Ant Build for Selenium Java project

Ant is a build tool which could be used to have your tests running either from command line or from Hudson CI tool. There is detailed documentation available for ant here but probably you need to know only a little part of it for you selenium tests. The essentials which are needed to know are: Project Target (ant execution point and collection of tasks) Tasks (could be as simple as compilation) And there would usually be following targets for Selenium tools - setClassPath - so that ant knows where you jar files are loadTestNG - so that you could use testng task in ant and use it to execute testng tests from ant init - created the build file clean - delete the build file compile - compiles the selenium tests run - executes the selenium tests Here is my project set up for ant -
8 comments
Read more

Verify email confirmation using Selenium WebDriver

Note: If you are new to java and selenium then start with selenium java training videos .   How to Verify Email Confirmation Using Selenium 4 and JavaMail (2026 Guide) Email confirmation is a critical part of most registration flows — account activation, password reset, multi-factor authentication, and onboarding. Every automation engineer eventually faces the same challenge: How do you verify an email confirmation link inside a Selenium test without making it slow and flaky? The wrong instinct is to automate Gmail's UI with Selenium. It's fragile, slow, and breaks constantly. The right approach: Use Selenium for browser automation Use JavaMail (IMAP) to read the email directly Extract the confirmation link Continue the test in Selenium Why Not Automate Gmail UI With Selenium? Automating the Gmail UI means logging in, searching, clicking a message, and parsing content from a third-party interface that changes frequently. This leads to: Flaky...
13 comments
Read more

Using xPath to reach parent of an element

Note: If you are new to java and selenium then start with selenium java training videos .   I prefer css locator over xPath but there are times when css locators don't fit requirement. One such requirement is when you want to navigate to parent element of an element and may be parent of parent and even more. Unfortunately css locators don't provide any mechanism to navigate to parent of an element. See this for more. Of late I came across a scenario when I wanted to click on a link depending upon the text in a text box. Herein parent of text box and parent of link were at the same location. More over there could have been many such combinations in application. Fortunately I just need to pick first such instance and Web Driver any way considers only first instance when multiple locators are found matching an element. Element in question is in following html - Here I need to click on highlighted anchor on the basis of input element (which is also hig...
Read more