How to locate a span with a specific text in Selenium? (Using Java)

Question

I'm having trouble locating a span element in Selenium using java.

the HTML looks like:

<div class="settings-padding">
<span>Settings</span>
</div>

And I've tried the following with no luck:

By.xpath("span[.='Settings']")

and

By.xpath("span[text()='Settings']")

and

By.cssSelector("div[class='settings-padding']"))

as well as some other similar attempts. Could you point me to the best method to do this? As it stands I constantly get "Unable to locate element" error in eclipse.

Answer 1

Your all xpath are looks OK, Just some syntactically incorrect. you are missing // in your xpath

The correct xpath are as below :-

By by = By.xpath("//span[.='Settings']")

Or

By by = By.xpath("//span[text()='Settings']")

Or

By by = By.xpath("//div[@class='settings-padding']/span"))

Or you can use cssSelector as :-

By by = By.cssSelector("div.settings-padding > span"))

Using anyone of the above By locator you can locate element as below :-

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
WebElement el = wait.until(presenceOfElementLocated(by));

Hope it helps...:)