Question

I has a page as follow:

<table>
<tr>
    <th>Company Name</th>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td><a href="www.whatever.com"> What Ever Company</a></td>
</tr>
</table>

The company name is placed arbitrary in the table, so I can only use the link’s text to locate the link:

selenium.click("link='What Ever Company'");

However, it says: ERROR:Element link='What Ever Company' not found.

What is the problem here? Is there any other way to click on the link?

Many thanks.

EDIT
Seem that the problem is I have several links with the same text (my bad). After making the link’s text unique, I use selenium.click("//a[contains(text(),'Test Campaign 1756237989')]") and it works.

Answer 1

Could this be because you’re forgetting the space at the start of the link?

selenium.click("link=' What Ever Company'");
                      ^

Another possible way of clicking the link, is to use an XPath expression:

selenium.click("//a[contains(.,'What Ever Company')]");

This will match all links with ‘What Ever Company’ in it.

If you want it more exact:

selenium.click("//a[.=' What Ever Company']");

This will only match if the anchor equals ‘ What Ever Company’.

Another option is to make the search more specific (i.e. tell the locator this link is always inside a <td> with an <a> inside):

selenium.click("//td[a]/a[contains(.,'What Ever Company')]");

The //td[a] looks for all <td> elements with <a> inside. (Differs from //td/a in that if you look for elements with //td[a][2] you get the second <a> which is inside a <td>, while //td/a[2] on the other hand gets the second <a> of the first <td>.)

EDIT: I thought using . as a reference to text() in the XPath expressions should work, but if it doesn’t, try using text() instead.