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Can anyone tell me the difference between the @textContent attribute, the text() function and the dot (.) in xpath? I performed several tests using the findElements(By.xpath) method of Selenium and the Firefox browser, but I could not understand why the results.
The basic HTML I used was the following:
<html>
<body>
<p id="1">
<span>A jaqueta vermelha</span>
</p>
<p id="2">
<span>A</span><span>jaqueta</span><span>vermelha</span>
</p>
<p id="3">
<span>A</span> <span>jaqueta</span> <span>vermelha</span>
</p>
<p id="4">
<span>A<br />jaqueta<br />vermelha
</span>
</p>
<p id="5">
<span>A <br />jaqueta <br />vermelha
</span>
</p>
<p id="6">
<span><pre>
A
jaqueta
vermelha
</pre></span>
</p>
<p id="7">
<span>A jaqueta</span>
</p>
<p id="8">
<span>A</span><span>jaqueta</span>
</p>
<p id="9">
<span>A</span> <span>jaqueta</span>
</p>
<p id="10">
<span>A<br />jaqueta
</span>
</p>
<p id="11">
<span>A <br />jaqueta
</span>
</p>
<p id="12">
<span><pre>
A
jaqueta
</pre></span>
</p>
<p id="13">
<pre>
A
jaqueta
</pre>
</p>
</body>
</html>
The most illustrative examples among the various xpath I tested were:
- "//p[@textContent=text()]"
- "//p[@textContent=.]"
- "//p[text()=.]"
- "//p[normalize-space(@textContent)=normalize-space(text())]"
- "//p[normalize-space(@textContent)=normalize-space(.)]"
- "//p[normalize-space(text())=normalize-space(.)]"
Briefly, the results obtained were:
- Queries 1, 2 and 3 did not return Webelement’s, that is, no Webelement was found.
- Query 4 returned all 13 tags
<p>with @id attribute and still 5 instances of Webelement’s without @id attribute. - Queries 5 and 6 returned tags
<p>of @id 6, 12 and 3, that is, only those containing the tag<pre>as daughter, and still 3 instances of Webelement’s without @id attribute. - Webelement’s without @id attribute of queries 4, 5 and 6 return the value '' when gettext() and getattribute("textContent") methods are called.