No Automated Testing

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.

Given the lack of testing hooks in web applications, many a times Selenium Users use XPath to work on UI Objects. So far I used to use Selenium IDE to test XPath in Firefox. I read a blog post here and got to know that Firebug itself can be used to test XPath. This is accomplished using $x function in Firefox. Consider that highlighted text box does not have a constant identifier hence following XPath is to be used > $x("//input[@name='search']") Write this XPath on Console of Firebug and hit enter - Keep mouse pointer on 'input' in console and it would highlight the text box in page. Using Firebug Lite Firebug can be used for other browsers as well and in turn to test XPath on other browsers.......