TypeError: Failed to execute 'evaluate' on 'Document': The result is not a node set, and therefore cannot be converted using Xpath through Selenium

Question

Part of page source:

<span style="display:block; overflow:hidden; white-space: nowrap">Gi2/0/20</span>

Parts of the code:

from selenium import webdriver
...
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
...
IP_CLICK = browser.find_element_by_xpath('//span[@style="display:block; overflow:hidden; white-space: nowrap"]/text()="Gi2/0/20"').click()

I am trying to select an element in my web page with the xpath expression, but I'm getting the following error:

InvalidSelectorException: invalid selector: Unable to locate an element with the xpath expression //span[@style="display:block; overflow:hidden; white-space: nowrap"]/text()="Gi2/0/20" because of the following error:

TypeError: Failed to execute 'evaluate' on 'Document': The result is not a node set, and therefore cannot be converted to the desired type. (Session info: chrome=72.0.3626.121) (Driver info: chromedriver=73.0.3683.20 (8e2b610813e167eee3619ac4ce6e42e3ec622017),platform=Windows NT 6.1.7601 SP1 x86_64)

Solution 1

You are using the invalid xpath expression, use the below modified xpath :

IP_CLICK = browser.find_element_by_xpath("//span[text()='Gi2/0/20']");
IP_CLICK.click();

If there are multiple matches then use the indexing, I mean pass the matching index number in the below xpath :

xpath = "(//span[text()='Gi2/0/20'])[Matching index number goes here]";
IP_CLICK = browser.find_element_by_xpath(xpath);
IP_CLICK.click();

Solution 2

This error message...

TypeError: Failed to execute 'evaluate' on 'Document': The result is not a node set, and therefore cannot be converted to the desired type. 
 (Session info: chrome=72.0.3626.121) (Driver info: chromedriver=73.0.3683.20 (8e2b610813e167eee3619ac4ce6e42e3ec622017),platform=Windows NT 6.1.7601 SP1 x86_64)

...implies that the result of executing the xpath expression was not a node set.

Syntactically, the xpath expression you have used is a legit xpath expression which uses the text() node as in parent_element/text()="Gi2/0/20" following xpath v3.0.

Unfortunately Selenium implements xpath v1.0 which doesn't supports text() nodes.

Additionally, click() doesn't returns anything, so IP_CLICK is not needed.

Solution

To click() on the element, you can use either of the following solutions:

• Xpath 1:

  browser.find_element_by_xpath("//span[text()='Gi2/0/20']").click()
  

• Xpath 2:

  browser.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(., 'Gi2/0/20')]").click()