selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException with “span:contains(‘string’)”

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The error says it all :

selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: Given css selector expression "span:contains('Control panel')" is invalid: InvalidSelectorError: 'span:contains('Control panel')' is not a valid selector: "span:contains('Control panel')"

As per Issue#987 and Issue#1547:

The :contains pseudo-class isn't in the CSS Spec and is not supported by either Firefox or Chrome (even outside WebDriver).

The pseudo-class was specific to the Sizzle Selector Engine that Selenium 1.0 relied on. But, it was decided that WebDriver was not going to support the Sizzle style CSS selectors that Selenium 1.0 used.

Now, an interesting fact is the :contains pseudo-class will work for browsers that don’t natively support CSS selectors (IE7, IE8, etc) which causes
inconsistencies between browsers and selectors.

Hence a better solution would have been to go with any other attribute of the <span> tag as follows :

element = "span[attribute_name=attribute_value]"

Alternate Solution

You can use either of the following xpaths as per the prevailing DOM Tree:

  • Using text():

    element = my_driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[text()='Control panel']")

  • Using contains():

    element = my_driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(.,'Control panel')]")

  • Using normalize-space():

    element = my_driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[normalize-space()='Control panel']")

Using jQuery

You can also use jQuery as follows:

$('span:contains("Control panel")')

Trivia :

A valuable comment from @FlorentB.

CSS selector is not supported by the console either, but JQuery supports it. The $('...') from the console is a shorthand for document.querySelector which is generally overridden with JQuery when the page has it.

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