Let's say you want to find the element with the text hello in the following DOM tree:

<html>
  <body>
    <article>
      <strong>hello</strong>
      <strong>world</strong>
    </article>
  </body>
</html>

Rails professionals since 2007

Our laser focus on a single technology has made us a leader in this space. Need help?

We build a solid first version of your product
We train your development team
We rescue your project in trouble

Read more Show archive.org snapshot

You might think of using jQuery's :contains Show archive.org snapshot selector:

$(":contains('hello')")

Unfortunately that returns a lot more elements than you expect:

[ <html>...<html>,
  <body>...</body>,
  <article>...</article>,
  <strong>hello</strong> ]

The reason for this is that all of these elements contain the word hello!

What you need to do instead is to find all elements containing "hello" which don't have a descendant containing "hello":

$(":contains('hello'):not(:has(:contains('hello')))")

Note that :contains and :has are non-standard selectors that are available in jQuery's selector engine only. You can't use them in other libraries that match CSS selectors, such as Nokogiri or Capybara.

You can do the same with an XPath expression, though. So e.g. in Capybara:

page.find(:xpath, ".//*[contains(text(), 'hello') and not (./*[contains(text(), 'hello')])]")

Find the innermost DOM element that contains a given string

Rails professionals since 2007