How to escape single quote in xpath 1.0 in selenium for python

In XPath 1.0, which is used by browsers and therefore by Selenium, there is no native way of escaping string literals (which was remedied in XPath 2.0). A few workarounds are mentioned by this poster, which includes:

• First off, make sure you understand the difference between escaping in Python, which is possible, and escaping within the XPath expression
• Then, if you simply need a single quote, surround it by double quotes, and vice versa
• Then, if one string literal contains both double and single quotes, use something like concat('"', "Here's Johnny", '"', ", said Johnny."), which combines to the literal: "Here's Johnny", said Johnny..

In your case, this would work:

driver.find_element_by_xpath(u"//span[text()=\"" + cat2 + "\"]").click()

Another way around this is to set an XPath variable to contain the value of your string literal, which helps in readability. But I couldn't find how to do it with the web drivers for Selenium, which typically means there is no such method available.

Here is a Python function I've just wrote that escapes a string to use in an XPath 1.0 expression, using the trick described in @Abel's answer:

def escape_string_for_xpath(s):
    if '"' in s and "'" in s:
        return 'concat(%s)' % ", '\"',".join('"%s"' % x for x in s.split('"'))
    elif '"' in s:
        return "'%s'" % s
    return '"%s"' % s

Note that it adds the appropriate kind of quotes around your string, so be sure not to add extra quotes around the return value.

Usage example:

escaped_title = escape_string_for_xpath('"that\'ll be the "day"')

driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[@title=' + escaped_title + ']')