XPath unable to detect text with & nbsp; as spaces

[Mark]

Hi All,

My XPath expressions aren't matching text in cases where the text contains spaces created using  . Take this example :

{code:html}<node>sample& nbsp;text</node>{code}

the Xpath expression "//node[ . = 'sample text']" won't match this node, "//node[ . = 'sample& nbsp;text']" also doesn' work. If the   in the source is changed to a normal white space everything works just fine. I've been testing this with firefox, I get the same results even when using the "XPather" firefox extension for the Dom Inspector. As a side note i find that thing extremely handy for building Xpath expressions, definitely recommend it :)

I'm really hoping there is some kind of html-decode() function that can be used, or some other way of escaping things so it works. I've done a lot of searching and come up with nothing except this forum post :

http://osdir.com/ml/web.selenium.devel/2005-12/msg00040.html

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Mark

Edited by: iceman153 on Feb 29, 2008 4:52 PM

Discovered the Edit feature and fixed the nbsp's

[ΓΙΑΝΝΗΣ ΠΑΠΑΔΑΚΗΣ]

I have the same problem and tried various solutions but none worked for me:

like //*[starts-with(translate(text(), ' ', ''), 'YoursText')]

The only thing that worked was to replace the text with text.replaceAll(" ","\u00A0")

Regards,

Giannis

[David]

The only thing that worked was to replace the text with text.replaceAll(" ","\u00A0")

You mean using Java's string.replaceAll() method? So use your language's relevant string replace method to do same.