How to identify element with knowledge of partial text for any tag (eg. div,span etc.) contains?

Question

My source goes like this:

<div name="something" id="something"....>IPS125</div>

the number after IPS always changes. So I need to give the identification attribute as partial text "IPS". (name and id are horribly changing every time I open source.)

Answer 1

Use contains() or starts-with() function in XPath:

Solution :

With contains():

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

With starts-with():

//*[starts-with(@id,'IPS')]

Where * means any element. Let me know If any query.

Answer 2

You should use xpath. If your text 'IPS' is the text inside tag use this: //*[contains(.,'IPS')].

If 'IPS' is for example part of @class atrribute use this: //*[contains(@class,'IPS')].

If 'IPS' is always at the begginig of the text you can use starts-with command instead of contains.

Unfortunately web browsers dont support Xpath 2.0 which provides regular expressions.

Answer 3

I use this function with good results:

    static WebElement getElementsWithAlteratingNames(String PartialName, String Tag, WebDriver driver, String Attribute) {
    try {
        List<WebElement> Elements = driver.findElements(By.tagName(Tag));
        String[] ElementStrings = new String[Elements.size()];
        System.out.println(Elements.size());
        for (int LoopCounter = 0; LoopCounter < Elements.size(); LoopCounter++) {
            ElementStrings[LoopCounter] = Elements.get(LoopCounter).getAttribute(Attribute).toString();
            if (ElementStrings[LoopCounter].contains(PartialName)) {
                System.out.println(ElementStrings[LoopCounter]);
                return Elements.get(LoopCounter);
            }
        }

    } catch (Exception e) {
        System.out.println("Could not generate a list of elements");
    }
    return null;
}

I've kept it fairly abstract so you can easily costumize it to serve the individual needs of your wanted Element.

Update

Since the Method is just not good and throws away efficiency if made a small update that does pretty much the same:

static WebElement findElem(String Tag, String Att, String Value){ 
    List<WebElement>Elems = driver.findElements(By.tagName(Tag)); 
       for(WebElement Elem : Elems){ 
           if(Elem.getAttribute(Att).contains(Value)) return Elem; 
       }
     } 

Since the code above isn't something that would pass a code review if one of my team did it I wouldn't feel good to leave it that way.