I need to click a dropdown list and click a hidden element with in it. the html will be generated by javascript and I won't know the id or class name but I will know it will have a phrase in it. Can I find and element by regex and then click it with selenium?
2 Answers
You cannot simply do regex-based search with built-in selenium webdriver locators, but you have multiple things that might help you:
contains()andstarts-with()XPath functions://div[contains(., "Desired text")] //div[starts-with(., "Desired text")]preceding,preceding-sibling,followingandfollowing-siblingaxis that might help you if you know the relative position of an newly generated block of elements you need to locate
There are also CSS selectors for partial match on element attributes:
a[href*=desiredSubstring] # contains
a[href^=desiredSubstring] # starts-with
a[href$=desiredSubstring] # ends-with
And you can always find more elements than needed and filter them out later in Python, example:
import re
pattern = re.compile(r"^Some \w+ text.$")
elements = driver.find_elements_by_css_selector("div.some_class")
for element in elements:
match = pattern.match(element.text)
if match:
print(element.text)
Comments
You can use import re to perform regex functions. The snippet below looks through a table and grabs the text between the <b></b> tags in the first cell if the row has 3 cells in it.
import re
from lxml import html, etree
tree = html.fromstring(browser.page_source)
party_table = tree.xpath("//table")
assert len(party_table) == 1
CURRENT_PARTIES = []
for row in party_table[0].xpath("tbody/tr"):
cells = row.xpath("td")
if len(cells) != 3:
continue
if cells[1].text == "represented by":
match = re.search(r'<b>(.+?)</b>', etree.tostring(cells[0]), re.IGNORECASE)
print "MATCH: ", match
