How do I escape an apostrophe in my XPath text que

Question

I have an XPath query which needs to match some text in a span attribute, as follows:

my $perl_query = qq(span[text\(\)='It's a problem']);

$sel->click_ok($perl_query);

Where the text has no apostrophe there is no problem.

I've tried the following instead of 'It's a problem':

'It\'s a problem'
'It&apos\;s a problem'
'It\${apos}s a problem'  #some thread on Stackoverflow suggested that this was a solution implemented by Selenium, but it doesn't work.

Any ideas?

On a different note, if I can't solve this, I'd be happy enough matching 'a problem' but not sure how to do regex matching in XPath with Selenium.

Thanks for any pointers

Answer 1

It's an XPath problem rather than the Perl problem.

The problem was discussed and answered here in great detail: http://kushalm.com/the-perils-of-xpath-expressions-specifically-escaping-quotes (broken link)

In a nutshell, modify your xquery to assemble the quote-containing string using concat()

my $perl_query = qq(span[text\(\)=concat("It","'","s a problem"]);

Answer 2

Is it possible that the actual text on the web page is a curly quote and not a straight apostrophe? Also, you may have extra space at the beginning and end of the span, so that the strict equality against your string won't match.

Answer 3

Well the post is quite old. But here goes my working answer for those who still come wandering around looking for escaping single apostrophe and unable to find proper answer.

Text = It's a problem

Solution xpath = //div[text()=\"It's a problem\"]

or

Solution xpath = //div[contains(text(),\"It's a\")]

Answer 4

A couple of suggestions; hopefully at least one of them will work:

my $perl_query = qq!span[text()='It\\'s a problem']!;
my $perl_query = qq!span[text()="It's a problem"]!;

Answer 5

The solution to escaping apostrophes in xpath string literals is to double the apostrophe, e.g. qq(span[text()='It''s a problem'])

Answer 6

I just had the same problem and google didn't give me a satisfied solution.

I tried to substring this: value=' - ending with an Apostrophe.

My XPath that works look like:

"substring-after(., concat('value=', ''''))"

So four Apostrophes in a row.