How do I find an element that contains specific text in Selenium WebDriver (Python)?

Question

I'm trying to test a complicated JavaScript interface with Selenium (using the Python interface, and across multiple browsers). I have a number of buttons of the form:

<div>My Button</div>

I'd like to be able to search for buttons based on "My Button" (or non-case-sensitive, partial matches such as "my button" or "button").

I'm finding this amazingly difficult, to the extent to which I feel like I'm missing something obvious. The best thing I have so far is:

driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//div[contains(text(), "' + text + '")]')

This is case-sensitive, however. The other thing I've tried is iterating through all the divs on the page, and checking the element.text property. However, every time you get a situation of the form:

<div class="outer"><div class="inner">My Button</div></div>

div.outer also has "My Button" as the text. To fix that, I've tried looking to see if div.outer is the parent of div.inner, but I couldn't figure out how to do that (element.get_element_by_xpath('..') returns an element's parent, but it tests not equal to div.outer).

Also, iterating through all the elements on the page seems to be really slow, at least using the Chrome webdriver.

Ideas?

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I asked (and answered) a more specific version here: How to get text of an element in Selenium WebDriver, without including child element text?

Answer 1

Try the following:

driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'My Button')]")