Selecting xpath using a variable in selenium 2

Question

I am doing a selenium automation where I want to pass the variable into the XPath and select the element.

The xpath which I am trying looks like:

browser.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(.,'SEM W880 Black')]")

I would like to pass the text SEM W880 Black as a variable to the XPath. How can I do it using python 3?

Answer 1

At first glance, this appears to be a Python question rather than a QA question. The answer to the Python question is something like,

x = 'SEM W880 Black'
browser.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(.,'" + x + "')]")

If I misunderstood you, please update the question.

Answer 2

If you are using Selenium IDE, you can do this:
Declaration in Selenium IDE:

<tr>
    <td>storeExpression</td>
    <td>SEM W880 Black</td>
    <td>name_of_your_variable</td>
</tr>

<tr>
    <td>clickAndWait</td>
    <td>//a[contains(text(),'${name_of_your_variable}')]</td>
    <td></td>
</tr>

Simply put, you can store the variable and use it between simple quotes.

Please take note that the target field, in Selenium IDE is without any kind of quotes.