How to find an element by matching exact text of the element in Capybara

Question

I have following two elements in HTML

<a href="/berlin" >Berlin</a>
<a href="/berlin" >Berlin Germany </a>

I am trying to find the element by using following Capybara method

find("a", :text => "berlin")

Above will return two elements because both contains text berlin.

Is there a way to match exact text in Capybara ?

Answer 1

Use a regexp instead of a string for the value of the :text key:

find("a", :text => /\ABerlin\z/)

Check out the 'Options Hash' section of the Method: Capybara::Node::Finders#all documentation.

PS: text matches are case sensitive. Your example code actually raises an error:

find("a", :text => "berlin")
# => Capybara::ElementNotFound:
#    Unable to find css "a" with text "berlin"

Answer 2

Depending on which version of the gem you are using

find('a', text: 'Berlin', exact: true)

may be deprecated. In which case you would have to use

find('a', text: 'Berlin', match: :prefer_exact)

Answer 3

You can do so too:

find('a', text: 'Berlin', exact_text: true)

That will find for CSS.

And using only exact: true instead of exact_text will show you a msg that exact option is only valid for XPATH.

Answer 4

Just use Capybara's exact option:

Capybara.exact = true

Answer 5

My preference is to use the have_selector with text and exact_text: true:

expect(body).to have_selector 'a', text: 'Berlin', exact_text: true

Answer 6

For using click_link in capybara you need to add one more property in the method using it.

click_link(link_name, :text => link_name)

Here the link_name is the text value of a link. Using :text keyword we are specifying that we want to click on a link having the text value which is exact matching to our requirement.