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

In XPath 1.0, which is used by browsers and therefore by Selenium, there is no native way of escaping string literals (which was remedied in XPath 2.0). A few workarounds are mentioned by this poster, which includes:

• First off, make sure you understand the difference between escaping in Python, which is possible, and escaping within the XPath expression
• Then, if you simply need a single quote, surround it by double quotes, and vice versa
• Then, if one string literal contains both double and single quotes, use something like concat('"', "Here's Johnny", '"', ", said Johnny."), which combines to the literal: "Here's Johnny", said Johnny..

In your case, this would work:

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

Another way around this is to set an XPath variable to contain the value of your string literal, which helps in readability. But I couldn't find how to do it with the web drivers for Selenium, which typically means there is no such method available.

Answer 2

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 + ']')