CSS Locator with contains() InvalidSelectorException using Selenium WebDriver
Solution 1
CssSelector
does not work in scripting but it works in selenium IDE.
It's also not good to work on sites like gmail.
Solution 2
The main problem is at this line:
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("a:contains('About Google')"));
css
doesn't maintain contains()
for Selenium WD - See here.
For using contains()
you have to use Xpath.
With Xpath your locator will be:
//a[contains(text(), 'About Google')]
and for driver it will be as:
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//a[contains(text(), 'About Google')]"));
For finding links with Selenium you can use:
driver.findElement(By.linkText("your link name here"));
It is limitation of CSS selectors compare to Xpath:
- you can't take parent element with CSS selectors (Xpath has XPath axes)
- you can't use contains (it is only XPath privilege).
BTW
For processing Xpath locators from page you able to use extension for Firefox browser:
Sandeep Dharembra
Updated on July 16, 2022Comments
-
Sandeep Dharembra almost 2 years
I am learning Selenium Webdriver and trying to write a simple test script.
The intent is to get the
About Google
link on Gmail page so as to practice CSS locators.Here is the code:
public class GoogleSearch { public static void main(String[] args) { WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(); driver.get("https://www.gmail.com"); WebElement aboutGoogle = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("a:contains('About Google')")); driver.close(); driver.quit(); } }
I get the below-mentioned exception:
Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.InvalidSelectorException: The given selector a:contains('About Google') is either invalid or does not result in a WebElement. The following error occurred: InvalidSelectorError: An invalid or illegal selector was specified Command duration or timeout: 356 milliseconds For documentation on this error, please visit: http://seleniumhq.org/exceptions/invalid_selector_exception.html Build info: version: '2.45.0', revision: '32a636c', time: '2015-03-05 22:01:35' System info: host: 'XXXXX', ip: '127.0.1.1', os.name: 'Linux', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '3.13.0-49-generic', java.version: '1.7.0_79' *** Element info: {Using=css selector, value=a:contains('Need')} Session ID: 0f1869f8-c59a-4f61-b1c7-b34ada42573f Driver info: org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver
I had checked and was able to find the element in Selenium IDE using the same locator.
I read somewhere that the
findElement()
method is returning a DOM node and the code is expecting a WebElement object.If this is the case then, is there a workaround/casting?
Any suggestions?