find List Item based on known string

I'm playing around with booking.com as I teach myself selenium / python. I'm trying to select a currency based on a known string e.g. 'USD'.

I'm able to click the currency icon to open the currency selection modal but then when I try to say find element where text = 'USD', I get:

selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: invalid selector: An invalid or illegal selector was specified

1. Here is the list item for 'USD':

<li class="ccff2b4c43 ea27cffb06"><button data-testid="selection-item" type="button" class="fc63351294 ea925ef36a bf97d4018a ae8177da1f cddb75f1fd"><div class="a1b3f50dcd a1f3ecff04 b2fe1a41c3 db7f07f643 d19ba76520"><div class="b1e6dd8416 aacd9d0b0a"><span class="cf67405157">U.S. Dollar<div class=" ea1163d21f">USD</div></span></div><div class=""></div></div></button></li>

2. Here is my known string I'm trying to search for:

currency = 'USD'

3. Here is my attempt at trying to find (then select) this string in the HTML:

selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, f'//span[text()={currency}]')
selected_currency_element.click()

I assume I don't need to read this modal's entire unordered list into an array then loop through it to find the string? Or do I?

Couple of things to rectify.

1. The used syntax is for XPATH and you have used CSS_SELECTOR need to change to XPATH

selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.XPATH, f'//span[text()={currency}]')

2. If you see the node USD is inside a DIV tag of parent SPAN
   So your xpath should be like
   selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.XPATH, f'//span[.//div[text()="{currency}"]]')

Instead of using the abbreviation, I used the long name. This works pretty good. By the way, I use Firefox as my browser

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium import webdriver
def change_currenecy(country):
dvr = webdriver.Firefox()
dvr.get("https://www.booking.com/")
dvr.find_elements(By.XPATH, "//span[contains(text(),'USD')]")[0].click()
dvr.find_elements(By.XPATH, f"//span[contains(text(),'{country}')]")[0].click()
change_currenecy("Thai Baht")

You need to take care of a couple of things here:

• Though you mentioed By.CSS_SELECTOR but the value is of a xpath. So you need to change the locator strategy as:

  selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.XPATH, f'xpath_value')
  

• The desired text USD is within the descendant <div> of it's parent <span>, so you need to go a step deeper.

Solution

Your effective line of code will be:

currency = 'USD'
selected_currency_element = self.find_element(By.XPATH, f'//span//div[text()={currency}]')
selected_currency_element.click()