How to use regex in XPath "contains" function

contains, regex, selenium-webdriver, xpath

Solution

XPath 1.0 doesn't handle regex natively, you could try something like

//*[starts-with(@id, 'sometext') and ends-with(@id, '_text')]

(as pointed out by paul t, `//*[boolean(number(substring-before(substring-after(@id, "sometext"), "_text")))]` could be used to perform the same check your original regex does, if you need to check for middle digits as well)

In XPath 2.0, try

//*[matches(@id, 'sometext\d+_text')]

Problem

I would like to match the following text `sometext12345_text` using the below regex. I'm using this in one of my selenium tests. ``` String expr = "//*[contains(@id, 'sometext[0-9]+_text')]"; driver.findElement(By.xpath(expr)); ``` It doesn't seem to work though. Can somebody help?

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