Message: invalid selector: An invalid or illegal selector was specified error using Selenium Python

Question

I'm trying to click on this element:

<td role="gridcell" class="mat-calendar-body-cell mat-calendar-body-active ng-star-inserted" tabindex="0" data-mat-row="0" data-mat-col="1" aria-label="May 2, 2022" aria-selected="true" style="width: 14.2857%; padding-top: 7.14286%; padding-bottom: 7.14286%;"><div class="mat-calendar-body-cell-content mat-focus-indicator mat-calendar-body-selected mat-calendar-body-today"> 2 </div><div class="mat-calendar-body-cell-preview"></div></td>

To do so, I'd like to select it via the element's aria-label (May 2, 2022). So I have a variable that contains the string "May 2, 2022" (the string is called theElement), and I plug it into a find_element function.

Why is this code snippet giving me the:

Message: invalid selector: An invalid or illegal selector was specified

error?

Code trials:

driver.find_element(by=By.CSS_SELECTOR, value="[aria-label="+theElement+"]")

Answer 1

To locate the <td> element through the value of the aria-label attribute i.e. May 2, 2022 you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using css_selector:

  element = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "td[aria-label='May 2, 2022']")
  

• Using xpath:

  element = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//td[@aria-label='May 2, 2022']")