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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T22:31:42+00:00

In the Selenium Doc they have used ^ , $ and * previous to

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In the Selenium Doc they have used ^, $ and * previous to the = operators the in the below code: But none of them are explained why such special symbols

soup.select('a[href="http://example.com/elsie"]')
# [<a class="sister" href="http://example.com/elsie" id="link1">Elsie</a>]

soup.select('a[href^="http://example.com/"]')
# [<a class="sister" href="http://example.com/elsie" id="link1">Elsie</a>,
#  <a class="sister" href="http://example.com/lacie" id="link2">Lacie</a>,
#  <a class="sister" href="http://example.com/tillie" id="link3">Tillie</a>]

soup.select('a[href$="tillie"]')
# [<a class="sister" href="http://example.com/tillie" id="link3">Tillie</a>]

soup.select('a[href*=".com/el"]')
# [<a class="sister" href="http://example.com/elsie" id="link1">Elsie</a>]
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Those are substring matching attribute selectors adapted from CSS 3:

    • = matches only if the given value is equal to the element’s attribute value.
    • ^= matches only if the given value is a prefix of the element’s attribute value.
    • $= matches only if the given value is a suffix of the element’s attribute value.
    • *= matches only if the given value is contained in the element’s attribute value.

    In your case:

    • a[href="http://example.com/elsie"] selects any a element whose href attribute value is equal to http://example.com/elsie.
    • a[href^="http://example.com/"] selects any a element whose href attribute value starts with http://example.com/.
    • a[href$="tillie"] selects any a element whose href attribute value ends with tillie.
    • a[href*=".com/el"] selects any a element whose href attribute value contains .com/el.
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