Getting selenium common exceptions InvalidSelectorException with span contains string

Question

I am currently working on selenium python in firefox. I am trying to find the element using the CSS selector

element = "span:contains('Controlpanel')"
my_driver.find_element_by_css_selector(element)

But I am getting the following error:

 raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: Given css selector expression "span:contains('Control panel')" is invalid: InvalidSelectorError: 'span:contains('Control panel')' is not a valid selector: "span:contains('Control panel')"

In selenium IDE I am successfully able to find the element by this field but it is not working for me in Python.

Answer 1

Use of css_selector to locate the element by text is not supported in Selenium. The only possibility is XPath, as shown:

element = "//span[contains(text(), 'Controlpanel')]"
my_driver.find_element_by_xpath(element)