XPath Find full HTML element ID from partial ID

Question

I am looking to write an XPath query to return the full element ID from a partial ID that I have constructed. Does anyone know how I could do this? From the following HTML (I have cut this down to remove work specific content) I am looking to extract f41_txtResponse from putting f41_txt into my query.

<input id="f41_txtResponse" class="GTTextField BGLQSTextField2 txtResponse"  value="asdasdadfgasdfg" name="f41_txtResponse" title="" tabindex="21"/>

Cheers

Solution 1

Thanks to Thomas Jung I have been able to figure this out. If I use:

//*[contains(./@id, 'f41_txt')]/@id

This will return just the ID I am looking for.

Solution 2

You can use contains to select the element:

//*[contains(@id, 'f41_txt')]

Comments

[user228178]

With the way we are generating the webpage this is retrieving everything where I am just looking for the element ID.

[Thomas Jung]

//*[contains(@id, 'f41_txt')] will select a list of tags you have to iterate over it and select the id attribute for each of them. You can use count(//*[contains(@id, 'f41_txt')]) to get the total number.

[user228178]

Thats not the best way to do this. I have answered my own question though with the help of you answer.

[Tomalak]

Be aware that this can fail. You might want to use //*[starts-with(@id, 'f41_txt')]/@id instead.

[Admin]

praise the lord, thanks to thomas jung i remembered that you always need the @ sign to find atrributes. duh.