Webdriver: How to find the element using text() in xpath?

Question

I'm new to selenium and HTML. I want to perform click operation for the elements "Users" and "Admins" as one after another. Below mentioned is the HTML code, unfortunately I can't modify it.

<ul id="nav">
<li class="">
    <a class="mainmenu" title="List of Users" menuid="nav_0">
        <span class="title">Users</span>
        <span class="arrow"/>
    </a>
    <ul class="sub-menu">
        <li>
            <a class="mainmenu" title="List of Admins" menuid="nav_0-sub_0">Admins</a>
        </li>
    </ul>
</li>
<li class="">
    <a class="mainmenu" title="List of Contents" menuid="nav_1">
        <span class="title">Contents</span>
    </a>
</li>
<li class="">
    <a class="mainmenu" title="Repos" menuid="nav_2">
        <span class="title">Repository</span>
    </a>
</li>       

I have used XPath like this:

.//*[@id='nav']/li[1]/a[contains(@title, 'List of Users'] 

Any other ways to get the element like matching the text value? Because the list elements order is dynamic, so the current position of the element "Users"(li[1]) might get change later.

Answer 1

As per given description, it seems that list of users will be maintained in HTML's List Item having common title=List of Users. So you can use something like below code to click on dynamic list items(here, users).

List<WebElement> Userlist = driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("a[title='List of Users']");

for(WebElement ulist : Userlist)
{
    //Do your action, e.g. click() with each user name.
}

Answer 2

You can try creating xpath with text() like these:

1. //span[contains(text(),'Users')]
2. //span[contains(text(),'Contents')]

Answer 3

To avoid the li[1], just use this XPath. It will still work, even if one of the li elements swap their locations in the html file.

//*[@id='nav']/li/a[contains(@title,'List of Users')]

If you only have one <a> element on the page, you could avoid the li part

//a[contains(@title,'List of Users')]

Answer 4

//*[@id='nav']/li[1]/a[contains(@title, 'List of Users'] 

You missed ) at the last ], it should be like below:

//*[@id='nav']/li[1]/a[contains(@title, 'List of Users')]