Question

Why does my code:

self.driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[text()[contains(.,'%s')]]" % ('Sorry'))

Get stuck and won’t pass this line? Even if I do something like:

driver.implicitly_wait(30)
self.driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[text()[contains(.,'%s')]]" % ('Sorry'))

Complete code:

# gets stuck here
if self.is_text_present('Hello'):
    print 'Hello'

# rest of code

def is_text_present(self, text):
    try:
        self.driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[contains(text(), "%s")]' % (text))
    except NoSuchElementException, e:
        return False
    return True

Answer 1

Your XPath can be simplified to

"//*[contains(text(),'%s')]" % ('Sorry')

Perhaps try something like:

import contextlib
import selenium.webdriver as webdriver
import selenium.webdriver.support.ui as ui

with contextlib.closing(webdriver.Firefox()) as driver:
    ...
    # Set up a WebDriverWait instance that will poll for up to 10 seconds
    wait = ui.WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
    # wait.until returns the value of the callback
    elt = wait.until(
        lambda driver: driver.find_element_by_xpath(
            "//*[contains(text(),'%s')]" % ('Sorry')
            ))

From the docs:

This waits up to 10 seconds before throwing a TimeoutException or if
it finds the element will return it in 0 – 10 seconds.

---

To debug the problem you might try saving the HTML source to a file right before calling find_element_by_xpath so you can see what the driver is seeing. Is the XPath valid for that HTML?.

def is_text_present(self, text):
    with open('/tmp/debug.html', 'w') as f:
        time.sleep(5)  # crude, but perhaps effective enough for debugging here. 
        f.write(driver.page_source)
    try:
        self.driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[contains(text(), "%s")]' % (text))
    except NoSuchElementException, e:
        return False
    return True