Is it possible to use a regular expression in a locator

[JohnMc]

Is it possible to use a regular expression in a locator

Eg. myElement = driver.findElements(By.id("/some regex/"));

[Daniel Wagner-Hall]

Not currently (though you can use xpath which has limited regex
support). If you would find it particularly useful, patches are
always welcome, and I can run you through how you might implement this
in any of the particular drivers.

On 10 August 2010 18:21, JohnMc <j.mcgu...@bigpond.com> wrote:
> Is it possible to use a regular expression in a locator
>
> Eg. myElement = driver.findElements(By.id("/some regex/"));
>

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[Aaron]

Daniel is right. XPath is very powerful... and can be easier than
RegEx to implement. Prior to WebDriver, I had never used XPath, and
now I depend on it heavily for certain situations. After just a few
minutes of reading you should be able to start building low-
maintenance xpath strings some elements on your page.

Good luck.

--
AF

[sheetal singh]

Hi,

Do we now have regex implementation in webdrivers for findby ID

 myElement = driver.findElements(By.id("/some regex/"));

Regards

Sheetal

[Krishnan Mahadevan]

Cant you achieve the same through including regex patterns with By.xpath ?

You could use xpath functions such as begins-with, contains etc.,

Wouldnt that solve your purpose ?

Thanks & Regards
Krishnan Mahadevan


My Scribblings @ http://wakened-cognition.blogspot.com/

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[sheetal singh]

Hi,

I havnt really looked into xpath as i thought it would be difficult to implement xpath in my case.

I am fetching all the iframe get created in page whose id start with "ad_". So it would be good if regex can be applied to ID rather xpath.

Regards

Sheetal

[Amit Agarwal]

Hi Sheetal,

Have you tried with CSS selector using { id^="ad_" } or Xpath //div[starts-with(@id,'ad')]

Regards,

Amit

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[sheetal singh]

Hi Amit,

Thanks for the reply..

I used xpath and it actually solved my problem..its gr8
List<WebElement> element=driver.findElements(By.xpath("//iframe[starts-with(@id,'ad_')]"));
                   
However i am getting illegal string exception when i try to use css and how can we use curly braket inside "". Moreover from where i can learn more such functions for xpath,css etc?
List<WebElement> element=driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("id^=ad_"));

Regards
Sheetal

[Amit Agarwal]

Hi Sheetal,

For Xpath related stuff, u can refer to 

http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_functions.asp

I am still looking for good resource on CSS, and truly speaking, still trying to learn CSS stuff. :)

Regards,

Amit

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