Selenium check if attribute contains part of a string in java

Question

So I have a webpage where the Id's of certain elements are generated dynamically with certain parts changing and certain parts being constant like so:

<div id= "xxxdiv" title= 'this title'>
  <p id = "xxxp">
  <table id = "xxxtable" title = 'not derp'>
         <div id = "yyyydiv">
           <table id = "yyytable" title= 'derp'>
             <table id = "yyytable2" title = 'not derp'>
               <table id = "zzztable" title = derp>

I'm trying to do some dynamic lookups on the page that can look for a given element where the id contains a known value. For instance, I do not always know how many nested elements might exist so the number that gets generated on the end can vary. So I would like to find an element by xpath where the @title = not derp and the @id contains yyy. How can I accomplish this?

Solution 1

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//table[@title='not derp' and contains(@id, 'yyy')]"));

will find the first element which matches your search criteria which would be <table id = "yyytable2" title = 'not derp'> of your HTML snippet.

Solution 2

There are a whole host of relational and logical operators you can use. In this case, assuming you're looking for the table element, you can use: //table[@title='not derp' and contains(@id,'yyyy')]

Solution 3

I would like to find an element by xpath where the @title = not derp and the @id contains yyy

I would suggest you cssSelector instead, because using By.cssSelector() to locate an element is much faster than By.xpath() in performance. So you should try as below :-

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("table[id *= 'yyy'][title = 'not derp']"));

Comments

[JeffC]

Technically this finds the first TABLE element... not just the first element. Depends on what OP wants. It can be easily switched to "//*[@title..." to make it generic.

[Würgspaß]

@JeffC True, I edited the answer in order to clarify.

[Jrawr]

Thank you. This was very helpful

[Jrawr]

I wasn't sure if contains(@id, 'yyy') looked for an element that contained a matching id or looked for an id that contained the provided text.

[m02ph3u5]

CSS selector faster than xpath? Is there any proof for that claim?