Is it possible to locate element by partial id match in Selenium

Question

I am trying to locate elements with generated ids wherein some part of the ID is known; for example:

id="page_x002e_x0023_default-create-firstname" 

in which the last 3 words (_default-create-firstname) are known but anything preceding that is subject to change. Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can apply an ends-with CSS selector:

By.cssSelector("[id$=default-create-firstname]") 

Update

Some time went by since the answer was posted. Here some update from the linked mozilla developer page and comments below:

New use By.css instead of By.cssSelector

By.css("[id$=default-create-firstname]") 

Also see the four possibilities of

• beginning with
• anywhere inside
• anywhere inside regardless capitalization
• end with

---

/* Internal links, beginning with "#" */ a[href^="#"] {   background-color: gold; }  /* Links with "example" anywhere in the URL */ a[href*="example"] {   background-color: silver; }  /* Links with "insensitive" anywhere in the URL,    regardless of capitalization */ a[href*="insensitive" i] {   color: cyan; }  /* Links that end in ".org" */ a[href$=".org"] {   color: red; } 

Answer 2

If you want to go down the xpath route then you could use contains(), like this:

//*[contains(@id,'_default-create-firstname')] 

This will search the entire page for an id that contains the text "_default-create-firstname". It can be easily made more specific