Appium xpath escaping apostrophes

Question

I have the code below in my appium script:

    public boolean isErrorDisplayedUnrecognisedLoginCredentials() {
        return appDriver.isElementExist(By.xpath("//UIAStaticText[@name='We don't recognize this user ID or password']"));
    }

The test is hanging since it treats the apostrophe in "don't" as a final apostrophe to close off the @name value. I have tried escaping the apostrophe in "don't" by using \', \', '

However, none of these are working and the tests keep failing. Anyone know how to get round this?

Answer 1

AFAIK, you can't escape quotes in xpath, but you can escape quotes in Java. So try to use escaped double quotes for the xpath literal string delimiter, for example :

By.xpath("//UIAStaticText[@name=\"We don't recognize this user ID or password\"]")

Answer 2

With XPath 1.0 (It should work with XPath 2.0):

By.xpath("//UIAStaticText[@name='We don't recognize this user ID or password']")

With XPath 2.0 we have two solutions:

1. By doubling the single apostrophe you will be able to escape the apostrophe: By.xpath("//UIAStaticText[@name='We don''t recognize this user ID or password']")

Recommended solution:

2. To define the Xpath, I would use the double quote (") instead of a apostrophe: By.xpath("//UIAStaticText[@name="We don't recognize this user ID or password"]")