Finding div containing text

Question

I have the following HTML and and XPath working

<div class="panel panel-default">
    <div class="panel-heading"><h1>Text to find</h1></div>
    <div class="panel-body">
        <div>
            ...
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

XPath:

.//div[div[@class[contains(.,'panel-heading')]][.//*[text()='Text to find']]]

The XPath expression will select the outer <div>.

Now if I remove the <h1> tag the XPath expression will no longer find the outer div. Can anyone explain me why, and what to do instead if I want to get the same result in the two cases.

har07 · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-07 13:37:31Z

3

That's because .//* part returns descendant elements of the <div class="panel-heading">. When you remove the h1 tag, the text node 'Text to find' is no longer contained in any descendant element (it is direct child of the context element now), hence can't be found using expression .//*[text()='Text to find'].

To make it work with and without h1 element, you can alter the predicate expression mentioned above to .//text()[.='Text to find'] :

.//div[div[@class[contains(.,'panel-heading')]][.//text()[.='Text to find']]]

.//text() simply returns descendant text nodes from current context element.

answered Apr 7, 2016 at 13:37

har07

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1 Comment

homaxto Over a year ago

Kudos for the fast response :)

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