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copied!<p>This will work:</p> <pre><code>//*[@id=\"Navigation\"]/descendant::span[text()='Matrices'] </code></pre> <p>Note that if you can, be specific in your XPath queries, mainly to aid readability and improve performance...that is the <code>*</code> in your query will query <strong>all</strong> elements in the page. I don't know what kind of element the <strong>Navigation</strong> element is, but you should put it's exact element type in, for instance if it's a div, make it:</p> <pre><code>//div[@id=\"Navigation\"]/descendant::span[text()='Matrices'] </code></pre> <p>A slight explanation for this XPath is that it will grab the <code>Navigation</code> element, and simply look <em>anywhere inside it</em> to find a <code>span</code> element that has the text of <code>Matrices</code>. Without the <code>descendant</code> bit in the XPath, it would only search for <strong>direct children</strong>. That means elements that a child of <code>Navigation</code>, nothing else - so if an element is a child of <code>TestDiv</code> which is a child of <code>Navigation</code>, <code>descendant</code> would catch it, without it you won't return any results.</p> <p>As for why <code>By.PartialLinkText</code> would not work, this would only search for anchor links. It is common, as you have seen, that anchor links have a <code>span</code> element inside them or sometimes it is just a <code>span</code> on it's own.</p> <p><code>By.PartialLinkText</code> and similarly <code>By.LinkText</code> would not 'see' this element, since it's not an anchor element.</p>

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