Using upper-case and lower-case xpath functions in selenium IDE

upper-case() and lower-case() are XPath 2.0 functions. Chances are your platform supports XPath 1.0 only.

Try:

translate('some text','abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz','ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')

which is the XPath 1.0 way to do it. Unfortunately, this requires knowledge of the alphabet the text uses. For plain English, the above probably works, but if you expect accented characters, make sure you add them to the list.


In most environments you are using XPath out of a host language of some sort, and can use the host language's capabilities to work around this XPath 1.0 limitation by externally providing upper- and lower-case variants of the search string to translate().

Shown on the example of Python:

search = 'Some Text'
lc = search.lower()
uc = search.upper()

xpath = f"//p[contains(translate(., '{lc}', '{uc}'), '{uc}')]"

This would produce the following XPath expression:

//p[contains(translate(., 'some text', 'SOME TEXT'), 'SOME TEXT')]

which searches case-insensitively and works for arbitrary search text.


If you are going to need upper case in multiple places in your xslt, you can define variables for the lower case and upper case and then use them in your translate function everywhere. It should make your xslt much cleaner.

Example at XSL/XPATH : No upper-case function in MSXML 4.0 ?