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

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) Updated: 2026 (Original article published August 02, 2011) Email confirmation is an integral part of most registration flows — account activation, password reset, multi-factor authentication, and onboarding emails. Sooner or later, every automation engineer faces the same challenge: How do we verify an email confirmation link inside a Selenium test without making the test slow and flaky? Many beginners try to automate Gmail UI using Selenium. That approach is fragile, slow, and tightly coupled to a third-party UI that changes frequently. A cleaner approach is this: Use Selenium for browser automation. Use JavaMail (IMAP) to read the email directly. Extract the confirmation link. Continue the test using Selenium. This guide shows a modern, production-ready approach using Selenium 4 and JavaMail . Why Not Auto...
13 comments
Read more

Capture network traffic using WebDriver

We often come across testing requirements when we need to analyze the network traffic to find - HTTP status of page Analyze header information to find if right information is passed Validating parameters related to ajax requests etc Selenium 1 has had a way to capture n/w traffic but the feature does not always work as expected. At times Selenium 1 does not capture all n/w traffic, And given that Selenium 1 APIs are almost dead it is
4 comments
Read more