Question

I am trying to grab one or more table cells that contain a particular string. I am not able to accomplish this with

var tableCells = table.FindElements(By.CssSelector("td:contains('my partial text')"));  

What is the correct css selector text to use here?

I’ve also tried the following:

var tableCells = table.FindElements(By.TagName("td")).Where(tableCell => tableCell.Contains("my partial text"));

but it is extremely slow.

Answer 1

There is no such CSS selector as :contains(). It was a proposal that was discarded years ago.

The reason table.FindElements(By.TagName("td")).Where(tableCell => tableCell.Contains("my partial text")); is slow should be at least partly obvious – you’re asking WebDriver to find every table cell in the document, and then iterate over them all.

You can do this much more efficiently using an XPath locator, something like table.FindElements(By.xpath("//td[contains(.,'my partial text')]")). This is exactly what it looks like – the XPath equivalent of your attempted CSS locator.