How To Use Python Variable In An Xpath Expression?

I am trying to get all the followers name from this website https://www.quora.com/profile/Karan-Bansal-3/followers Since the whole page is not loaded at once, I am using this every

Solution 1:

Use string concatenation in the hosting language so that i is evaluated before constructing the XPath. Otherwise, [i] is a predicate testing for the presence of an i element. You didn't state what your hosting language is, but assuming string concatenation is "string" + "string":

 "//div[@class='pagedlist_item'][" + i + "]/*/div[@class='ObjectCard-header']/a[@class='user']"

See also: How to pass variable parameter into XPath expression?

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Update: Ok, so you're hosting XPath in Python.

You can use + to concatenate above if you first cast i to a string via str(i),

 "//div[@class='pagedlist_item'][" + str(i) + "]/*/div[@class='ObjectCard-header']/a[@class='user']"

or you can use format() as is used in the link I provided:

 "//div[@class='pagedlist_item'][{}]/*/div[@class='ObjectCard-header']/a[@class='user']".format(i)

either way, place the above constructed XPath expressions into your call to find_element_by_xpath() and your problem should be solved.

Caution: Do not use this approach with untrusted values for i or you could open your code to XPath injection attacks.

Solution 2:

Firstly cast index/i variable to string using str(index) and then try using below:

content = rows.xpath('//div[@class="LookupHelpDesc"]['+index+']//text()').extract_first()

always use single quote.

Solution 3:

The solution is to first convert the index to a string.

index = str(i)
people = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@class='pagedlist_item'][" + index + "]/*/div[@class='ObjectCard-header']/a[@class='user']")
i++