[selenium] Selenium and xPath - locating a link by containing text

I'm trying to use xPath to find an element containing a piece of text, but I can't get it to work....

WebElement searchItemByText = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='popover-search']/div/div/ul/li[1]/a/span[contains(text()='Some text')]"));

If I remove the last bit with the "contains" thing, it locates my span element, but I need to select it based on the text contents. It's not gonna be a perfect match of 'Some text' either, because it might contain truncated strings as well.

Anyone see the issue?

Use this

//*[@id='popover-search']/div/div/ul/li[1]/a/span[contains(text(),'Some text')]

OR

//*[@id='popover-search']/div/div/ul/li[1]/a/span[contains(.,'Some text')]

@FindBy(xpath = "//button[@class='btn btn-primary' and contains(text(), 'Submit')]") private WebElementFacade submitButton;

public void clickOnSubmitButton() {
    submitButton.click();
}   

@FindBy(xpath = "//span[@class='y2' and contains(text(), 'Your Text')] ") 
private WebElementFacade emailLinkToVerifyAccount;

This approach will work for you, hopefully.