how to use normalize-space()

[Koti_WebDriver]

Hi ,

I have DOM as below 

<td nowrap="" align="">

<span style="font-size: 40px; line-height: 10px; vertical-align: middle; color:#fd9829">                                     ▪</span>

<font class="Result1">                                         001</font>

</td>

I wrote xpath as : //font[starts-with(normalize-space(.), "001")] not working .

But when I use contans as below is working fine.

//font[contains(normalize-space(.), "001")]

I need to write xpath using starts-with and normalize-space.

[darrell grainger]

Your XPath should work, assuming it is finding the correct element. If you view the page in Chrome and go to the console in the Inspect window, you can test your XPath. I would open the Inspect window, go to the Console and enter:

$x("//font[contains(normalize-space(.),'001')]")

This will return an array of elements. It should return an array of one element. If it returns an array of more than one element, it could be you are not finding the font element you think you are. You can then try different XPath locators to see which one will return one and only one element. If the normalize text is literally '001' you should be able to use:

$x("//font[normalize-space(.)='001']")

You don't need starts-with(). You can just use equals. If that does not work, maybe there is something other than whitespace in front of the text. I'm not sure how normalize-space will work with control characters. For example, in unicode there are something like a dozen different 'space' characters. I don't know if normalize-space would consider all of them as whitespace. If figure out if there are special, invisible characters in the string you can find the element in the Elements panel of the Inspect tool. If you double click the text it will let you copy it. Then you can paste it into an editor that handles special characters and lets you highlight them. For example, notepad++ on Windows will let you see how a string is encoded. Or I go to a bash shell, paste the string into an echo statement and process with od -c. On a macOS this would be:

echo "<paste text here>" | od -c

If there are special characters they will stand out. Or you can use od -x and look for hexidecimal characters which are greater than 7F. 

By the way, 'invisible' characters and whitespace is the cause of a lot of different defects. Knowing how to detect them is a good tool to have as a tester.

[KOTI SAMUDRAL]

Excellent :) .

Thank you very much Darrell Grainger .

Thanks
KOTI

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