How do I use regular expressions in between the CSS Selenium Selector code?

Question

I am having trouble to use the regular expression in between the unique element id.

Here's the html code

<td align="left" style="vertical-align: top; ">   
 <span class ="radiobutton"   id="mainId:gen_id_12e3:radiospan1e">      
   <input type="radio" name="radio1" value="on" id="radio1" tabindex="0" checked>       
     <label for="id-2024">Yes</label>

Using xpath, i used the selenium command below with (.*) in between the element id which works fine.

    selenium.click("xpath=//span[@id, 'mainId.*radiospan1e']");

However, I can't do the same in CSS as they have $ for the end of the id, ^ for the beginning and * at anywhere in the page but i want the id starting with mainId with some regular expression and ends with the unique id.

Any help would be appreciated.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:58:13Z

7

CSS doesn't support regular expressions in general, but if you just want to wildcard the entire middle part out of your ID, that's actually quite doable in CSS, as shown in this answer.

Given your code, you can use:

selenium.click("css=span[id^='mainId'][id$='radiospan1e']");

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:58

CommunityBot

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answered Mar 28, 2012 at 16:20

BoltClock

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5 Comments

seleniumlover Over a year ago

Thanks Boltclock. Clever way of using regular expressions in CSS :).

Ross Patterson Over a year ago

Just to be clear, as BoltClock says, CSS doesn't do regular expressions at all. $= is a tail-string match, that's all. Similarly *= is a partial-substring match, and ^= is a head-string match.

ishandutta2007 Over a year ago

Not working for me for selecting a div like this: <div class="matchCardMain_954a1"></div> with this driver.find_element_by_xpath("css=div[class^='matchCardMain_'][class$='1']")

BoltClock Over a year ago

@ishandutta2007: Because you're using find_element_by_xpath() and not find_element_by_css_selector().

ishandutta2007 Over a year ago

@BoltClock sure , can you make your answer more explicit specifying that, as it is not clear. So for xpath's case should it be driver.find_element_by_xpath("xpath=...") ?

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