I'm trying to use regex to match an id containing an unpredictable number in the middle of an otherwise predictable string, an example:
<div id="type-84289-model" class="vehicle">
I've tried various things, but it seems like the most obvious that should work is:
By.xpath("//div[matches(@id, 'type-.+-model')]"));
However that doesn't find the element. Can anyone point me in the right direction.
You can find the element, using following xpath:
driver.findElement(By.Xpath("//div[contains(@id, 'type-')][contains(@id, '-model')][@class='vehicle']"))
contains() to starts-with(). It's just as readable, less likely to generate false positives, and probably faster.curiosu is right that XPath 1 doesn't support regexps, and moreover Selenium doesn't support XPath 2. :-(
As you pointed out, ends-with() doesn't exist in XPath 1.0. So we can adapt CiaPan's answer as follows:
By.xpath("//div[starts-with(@id, 'type-') and
substring(@id, string-length(@id)-6) = '-model']"));
In case the id always start with a string ending with a hyphen followed by a number and ending with a string starting with a hyphen this could work:
//div[ contains (translate(@id, '1234567890',''),'--')]
so in your case
By.xpath("//div[ contains (translate(@id, '1234567890',''),'--')]");
Do you seriously want to use xpath and xpath to locate element? If not, and you just want to locate div, then you can use next selector:
driver.findElement(By.Css(".vehicle"));
//or
driver.findElement(By.Css("div[class='vehicle']"));
UDPATE
If you need to find div that matches pattern type-...-model you still can use css selector for that. But AFAIK css selectors doesn't support regexp, so you can use starts/ends with attributes: Smth like this:
//find all divs which id starts with type
driver.findElement(By.Css("div[class^='type']"))
//find all divs which id ends with model
driver.findElement(By.Css("div[class$='model']"))
//find all divs which id starts with type and ends with model
driver.findElement(By.Css("div[class^='type'][class$='model']"))
Should work now.
type-...-model.
[starts-with(@id, 'type-') and ends-with(@id, '-model')].