Invalid SelectorException in Selenium with "span:contains('String')"

When using Selenium in Python with Firefox, attempting to find an element using the CSS selector "span:contains('Control panel')" may result in the following error:

selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Given css selector expression "span:contains('Control panel')" is invalid: InvalidSelectorError: 'span:contains('Control panel')' is not a valid selector: "span:contains('Control panel')"

This error indicates that the provided CSS selector is invalid. According to Issue#987 and Issue#1547, the ":contains" pseudo-class is not supported by Firefox or Chrome.

Solution:

The ":contains" pseudo-class is not a standard CSS selector and should be replaced with an alternative attribute selector. For example:

element = "span[attribute_name=attribute_value]"

Alternate XPaths:

If an attribute selector is not available, you can use one of the following XPaths:

element = my_driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[text()='Control panel']")
element = my_driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[contains(.,'Control panel')]")
element = my_driver.find_element_by_xpath("//span[normalize-space()='Control panel']")

jQuery Alternative:

$('span:contains("Control panel")')

Note:

CSS selectors are not supported in the browser console, but JQuery provides a shortcut for document.querySelector. As such, JQuery may support CSS selectors if it is enabled on the page.