How to use lxml to find an element by text?

Question

Assume we have the following html:

    
        TEXT A
        T         


        

Answer 1

You are very close. Use text()= rather than @text (which indicates an attribute).

e = root.xpath('.//a[text()="TEXT A"]')

Or, if you know only that the text contains "TEXT A",

e = root.xpath('.//a[contains(text(),"TEXT A")]')

Or, if you know only that text starts with "TEXT A",

e = root.xpath('.//a[starts-with(text(),"TEXT A")]')

See the docs for more on the available string functions.

---

For example,

import lxml.html as LH

text = '''\

    
        TEXT A
        TEXT B
        TEXT C
    
'''

root = LH.fromstring(text)
e = root.xpath('.//a[text()="TEXT A"]')
print(e)

yields

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