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I have a large HTML table of emails, i'm trying to find the name of a specific email and then select a button within this element. I can easily find the table body via XPATH with:

//*[@id="reportList"]/tbody

Then within this table there are multiple rows (tr), is it possible to search for text within all table rows?

The closest i've gotten is:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="reportList"]/tbody[contains(text(), "example text")]')

Unfortunately this can't locate the element.

I am aware I can simply copy the XPATH for the specific tr to locate, however for automation purposes i'm trying to pass a string and then search all tr's for my specific text.

Answers

As I know table has tr and td, and probably you need td. So the xPath could be like this:

driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//*[@id='reportList']/tbody//td[contains(text(), 'example text')]")

where ...tbody//td... means that it will search in all subnodes td of tbody. So td should not be a direct child of tbody

PS I would also add wait method to make sure that element is present:

# will wait up to 10 seconds until element will be present on the page
element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
        EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//*[@id='reportList']/tbody//td[contains(text(), 'example text')]"))
    )

Note: you have to do some imports:

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC