Regular expressions in xpaths

Question

I am using Java and Selenium. The HTML designers did not give really useful IDs. I need to access an element with the following:

<span id="gridcolumn-1040-textInnerEl" 

I can use

//span[contains(@id, 'gridcolumn') and (contains(@id, 'textInnerEl'))]

for the xpath but this can get complicated (this is a simpler example). is there any way to use a regexp in an xpath such as the following:

//span[match(@id, '^gridcolumn-[%d]+-testInnerEl$']

to avoid multiple and contains(@id,...)

Answer 1

Try to use below XPath to match span by regex:

//span[matches(@id, '^gridcolumn-\d+-textInnerEl$')]