Selenium Python: find_element_by_css_selector() using :contains()

Question

In Selenium on Python, I'm trying to select an element using

driver = webdriver.Firefox() driver.find_element_by_css_selector("td:contains('hello world')") 

Which gives me the error:

>>>> selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: u'An invalid or illegal string was specified' 

I can select elements using many different CSS selectors this way, but using :contains() always seems to throw an error. NOTE: I get the same error when i try to use:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//td[contains(text(),'hello world')]") 

Please advise. Thanks!

EDIT: SOLVED!

Problem solved! Thank you so much for your help! I had two significant mistakes: 1.) I thought that :contains() was an accepted css3 selector (turns out it is not part of the current spec, which is why i couldn't select that way) 2.) The xpath selector would have been fine except that I was using a parser that assumed xpath would never have any spaces in it, so it split the arguments by spaces. Therefore, when i passed in the xpath selector

//td[contains(text(),'hello world'] 

the parser was truncated it at the space after 'hello' so the xpath selector looked like

//td[contains(text(),'hello 

which clearly would throw an error. So i need to adjust my parsing to properly read my xpath selector.

Thank you again for all of your fast, helpful answers!

Answer 1

Replace find_element_by_xpath_selector with find_element_by_xpath (There is no find_element_by_xpath_selector method):

driver = webdriver.Firefox() ... driver = driver.find_element_by_xpath(u"//td[contains(text(), 'hello')]") 

---

COMPLETE EXAMPLE

from selenium import webdriver driver = webdriver.Firefox() driver.get('http://python.org') link = driver.find_element_by_xpath(u'//a[contains(text(), "Download")]') link.click() 

Answer 2

You are doing wrong way. You need to create first a driver object as below:

driver = webdriver.Firefox() 

Then navigate to the required url as below:

driver.get("http://www.python.org") 

Then on that driver object need to call the required method. There is no containsCSS Selectors. You can go ahead by this method find_element_by_xpath as below :

elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//td[contains(text(), 'hello')]") 

Answer 3

Instead of

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("td:contains('hello world')")

you can use this option too:

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("td*='hello world'")

Note: * in css_selector works same as contains in XPath

Reference: https://saucelabs.com/resources/articles/selenium-tips-css-selectors