Problems with escaping the equals sign in a Watir Robot argument

Question

We're currently using the very lovely Robot Framework for our automation.

Unfortunately, we've run into a hitch with the '=' character - we have a number of places in the app where we have a link to click, and no other options for identifying that element. Unfortunately, the links generally have a query string that includes the '=' character, e.g.:

   ClickLink   href=https://foo.bar.com/admin_login.php?action=logoff&clients_id=mytestaccount.foo.bar.com

Because Watir-Robot is able to match on multiple html tags, when Robot parses the above string to Watir-Robot it is using the "=" as a seperator. Watir-Robot sees the above as...

   href=https://foo.bar.com/admin_login.php?action
   id=logoff&clients_id (if no tag is stated it will default to id)
   id=mytestaccount.foo.bar.com

hence not matching on any of them.

As workarounds, we've tried the following with no success:

• Robot's built-in escape character, "\"
• Wrapping the string in "" or ''
• Replacing the "=" with the relevant html escape character "="
• Creating the variable ${EQUALS} containing "=" (without quotes), this had the same results as leaving them in in the first place (as variables are rectified BEFORE they are parsed)

What's the best way of resolving this issue?

Answer 1

testerab, you mentioned escaping the equals sign with the relevant HTML escape character. There are two kinds of encoding for special characters in HTML: entity notation and URL Encoding. In entity notation, an equals sign would be

&#x003D

In URL encoding, an equal sign would be

%3D

For your problem, the appropriate encoding would be URL encoding. If you haven't already, please give that a try.