XPath difference between dot and text

Question

My question is about specifics of using dot and text   in XPath  For example  following find element lines returns same element   driver get  http   stackoverflow com     driver find element by xpath    a text    Ask Question     driver find element by xpath    a    Ask Question       So what is the difference  What are the benefits and drawbacks of using   and text

User · Accepted Answer

There is a difference between   and text    but this difference might not surface because of your input document   If your input document looked like  the simplest document one can imagine given your XPath expressions   Example 1   lt html gt     lt a gt Ask Question lt  a gt   lt  html gt    Then   a text    Ask Question   and   a    Ask Question   indeed return exactly the same result  But consider a different input document that looks like  Example 2   lt html gt     lt a gt Ask Question lt other  gt     lt  a gt   lt  html gt    where the a element also has a child element other that follows immediately after  Ask Question   Given this second input document    a text    Ask Question   still returns the a element  while   a    Ask Question   does not return anything     This is because the meaning of the two predicates  everything between   and    is different   text    Ask Question   actually means  return true if any of the text nodes of an element contains exactly the text  Ask Question   On the other hand      Ask Question   means  return true if the string value of an element is identical to  Ask Question    In the XPath model  text inside XML elements can be partitioned into a number of text nodes if other elements interfere with the text  as in Example 2 above  There  the other element is between  Ask Question  and a newline character that also counts as text content   To make an even clearer example  consider as an input document   Example 3   lt a gt Ask Question lt other  gt more text lt  a gt    Here  the a element actually contains two text nodes   Ask Question  and  more text   since both are direct children of a  You can test this by running   a text   on this document  which will return  individual results separated by ----    Ask Question ----------------------- more text   So  in such a scenario  text   returns a set of individual nodes  while   in a predicate evaluates to the string concatenation of all text nodes  Again  you can test this claim with the path expression   a    Ask Questionmore text   which will successfully return the a element     Finally  keep in mind that some XPath functions can only take one single string as an input  As LarsH has pointed out in the comments  if such an XPath function  e g  contains    is given a sequence of nodes  it will only process the first node and silently ignore the rest

User · Answer

enter image description here The XPath text   function locates elements within a text node while dot     locate elements inside or outside a text node  In the image description screenshot  the XPath text   function will only locate Success in DOM Example 2  It will not find success in DOM Example 1 because it s located between the  tags    In addition  the text   function will not find success in DOM Example 3 because success does not have a direct relationship to the element   Here s a video demo explaining the difference between text   and dot     https   youtu be oi2Q7-0ZIBg

User · Answer

There is big difference between dot       and text    -   The dot       in XPath is called the  context item expression  because it refers to the context item  This could be match with a node  such as an element  attribute  or text node  or an atomic value  such as a string  number  or boolean   While text   refers to match only element text which is in string form  The dot       notation is the current node in the DOM  This is going to be an object of type Node while Using the XPath function text   to get the text for an element only gets the text up to the first inner element  If the text you are looking for is after the inner element you must use the current node to search for the string and not the XPath text   function    For an example  -    lt a href  something html  gt     lt img src  filename gif  gt    link  lt  a gt    Here if you want to find anchor a element by using text link  you need to use dot        Because if you use   a contains    link    it finds the anchor a element but if you use   a contains text    link    the text   function does not seem to find it   Hope it will help you

[selenium] XPath: difference between dot and text()

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