Adding string variable to xpath c# selenium

Question

I have probably spent a good 8 hours trying to figure this out but am constantly failing. I have searched an age for a solution

I am trying to find an selenium element by partial id match using xpath (c# selenium libraries). The following works perfectly fine. The partial text is sel_1-rowse1

IWebElement elem = wait5.Until(x => x.FindElement(By.XPath("//a[contains(@id,'sel_1-rowsel')]")));

However when I want to use a variable named partial this does not work

string partial = "sel_1-rowse1";
IWebElement search = wait.Until(x => x.FindElement(By.XPath(String.Format("//a[contains(@id,'{0}')]", partial))));

or

IWebElement search = wait.Until(x => x.FindElement(By.XPath(String.Format("//a[contains(@id,{0})]", partial))));

I have tried single quotes double quotes and escape chars. But cant figure this out. I cant even provide the error as its picking up a valid id. Brain is severely depleted on this one.

"does not work?" How? What's the output from your two examples above? — Arran
– Arran, Commented Apr 20, 2015 at 10:14
Sorry my debugging was fairly difficult as I could not debug on the network I ran the program on, Constant use of Console.Writeline to see what was happening in the program. The next two replies resoved the issue. — Kieran
– Kieran, Commented Apr 22, 2015 at 22:05

RVid · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-20 10:11:03Z

3

Just an observation, the first example element id ends with lower case 'L' (so l) while the second one with number 1. Might be just a copy paste error but worth asking...

answered Apr 20, 2015 at 10:11

RVid

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Kieran Over a year ago

Thanks. This was the problem. It took this long to not notice the difference between 1 and l . Always stuns me how many hours I can spend on something so trivial.

ddavison · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-20 14:14:36Z

1

partial is a reserved keyword in C#.

Refactor partial to something else (not reserved by C#) and you should be golden.

answered Apr 20, 2015 at 14:14

ddavison

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1 Comment

Kieran Over a year ago

Brilliant. This did not resolve the issue alone but I did remove partial

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