Question

I am trying to use a software name Selenium (web rat) to simulate user interact with browser

For example , I trying to put the username field with name ‘john

However the ‘id’ of ‘username textbox’ is username_947232, username_8237

The format which username_[random numbers]

My syntax is following:

//*[contains(@id="username_(/\d+/)")]

but it’s not working , anyone have any idea??

Thank you for any suggestions!

Answer 1

Use:

//*[starts-with(@id, 'username_')
  and 
   floor(substring-after(@id, 'username_')) = substring-after(@id, 'username_')
    ]

Explanation:

This expression selects any element the string value of whose id attribute starts with the string "username_" and the remainder of this string (after the starting "username_") is an integer.

Here we use the fact that the following expression is true if and only if $string represents an integer:

floor($string) = $string

XSLT – based verification:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
     <xsl:copy-of select=
      "//*[starts-with(@id, 'username_')
  and
   floor(substring-after(@id, 'username_')) = substring-after(@id, 'username_')
    ]
    "/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When this transformation is applied on this XML document:

<t>
 <user id="username_Xyz"/>
 <user id="username_Xyz123"/>
 <user id="username_123Xyz"/>
 <user id="username_123Xyz456"/>
 <user id="username_2015"/>
</t>

the Xpath expression is evaluated and the selected node from this evaluation is copied to the output:

<user id="username_2015"/>

Do note: The other two answers to this question would select all 5 user elements from the above document — which, of course, is incorrect.