How to escape single quote in xpath 1.0 in selenium for python

Question

I have the following code line used in selenium python script:

from selenium import webdriver

driver.find_element_by_xpath(u\"//span[text()=\'\" + cat2 + \"         


        

Answer 1

Here is a Python function I've just wrote that escapes a string to use in an XPath 1.0 expression, using the trick described in @Abel's answer:

def escape_string_for_xpath(s):
    if '"' in s and "'" in s:
        return 'concat(%s)' % ", '\"',".join('"%s"' % x for x in s.split('"'))
    elif '"' in s:
        return "'%s'" % s
    return '"%s"' % s

Note that it adds the appropriate kind of quotes around your string, so be sure not to add extra quotes around the return value.

Usage example:

escaped_title = escape_string_for_xpath('"that\'ll be the "day"')

driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[@title=' + escaped_title + ']')