[SOLVED] How to ignore a soft hyphen in an Xpath 1.0?

How to ignore a soft hyphen in an Xpath 1.0?

I'm trying to find the following button in Selenium (Java):

<bdi id="__label1-__xmlview1--Table-Popup-bdi">My But&shy;ton</bdi>

innerHTML & innerText of the element return My Button only. Outer html returns vale without hyphens as well:

<bdi id="__label1-__xmlview1--Table-Popup-bdi">My Button</bdi>

None of the answers for similar questions work for me, e.g.:

   //bdi[translate(., '&shy;', '') = 'My Button']
   //bdi[translate(., '\u00AD', '') = 'My Button']
   //bdi[contains(@id, 'Table') and contains(@id, 'Popup') and contains(translate(text(), '\u00AD', ''), 'My Button')]
   //bdi[contains(@id, 'Table') and contains(@id, 'Popup') and contains(translate(., '\u00AD', ''), 'My Button')]
   //bdi[contains(@id, 'Table') and contains(@id, 'Popup') and translate(text(), '\u00AD', '')='My Button']
   //bdi[contains(@id, 'Table') and contains(@id, 'Popup') and translate(., '\u00AD', '')='My Button']
   //bdi[translate(., '-', '') = 'My Button']

all of these are unable to find the button. If I provide a name of a button that does not have soft hyphens, the xpaths work alright (so I know it's a problem with the hyphens). replace() does not work, as I'm using Xpath 1.0. Using starts-with and ends-with or contains is not helpful in this case, as this issue occurs in several button names and I'm looking for a more universal solution than hardcoding each name break separately.

I only have DOM to work with, my team doesn't have any contact with developers so any help is appreciated. I'd love to understand what's happening here.

Edited: Please see VGR's comment for solution that worked for me.

Solution

this comment contained the solution - using string() instead of text() or . Read more: Difference between text() and string()

Does //bdi[translate(string(), '\u00AD', '') = 'My Button'] work?

– VGR Commented Oct 21 at 14:14