Capybara doesn't find select option

Question

I'm doing some scraping from a remote host, using Capybara with the Webkit driver (driving a form that uses JS).

The form is here.

The issue is I can't manage to select options by text, Capybara says it can't find them. E.g :

select("AICARDI René", from: "nom_message_annuaire")
Capybara::ElementNotFound: Unable to find option "AICARDI René"

The option exists. What gives?

Thanks!

I noticed that the tag looks like <option value="24">AICARDI René</option> Could this weird behaviour be because of the nbsp;? — Ahmed Aeon Axan
@AhmedAeonAxan: actually, I had tried adding the and now I found something that works, will post answer. Anyway, thanks for checking it out! — Andrei

Andrei Andrei · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-17T10:15:22

The issue was the   inside the option's text.

I solved it with:

select(Nokogiri::HTML("AICARDI&nbsp;Réné").text, from: "nom_message_annuaire")