Escaping special characters in symfony css selector or using wildcard

Question

I am using the Symfony\Component\DomCrawler\Crawler package to find a form with a name containing a number of css special chars

<input name="myfield[0].thing">

I am using

$messageElement = $crawler->filter('input[name=myField[0].thing]');

return $messageElement->attr($attribute);

But I get the error

Symfony\Component\CssSelector\Exception\SyntaxErrorException: Expected "]", but found.

Obviously this is because the symfony css selector is using [ ] to contain the attributes. So If I try an escape all the special chars

$crawler->filter('input[name=myField\[0\]\.thing]');

I now get empty output. How can I fix this?

Bonus question: is it possible to use a wildcard instead? * doesn't seem to work for me.

Isn't that all happend because you have no closing apostrophe? — malcolm, Oct 27 '16 at 19:51
no it was just a SO copy paste fail. If there was no apostrophe there would be a php compilation error — myol, Oct 28 '16 at 08:10

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:00

2

If you encapsulate the field name it should work, try this:

$messageElement = $crawler->filter('input[name="myField[0].thing"]');

return $messageElement->attr($attribute);.

For the bonus question, you can use a regex match similar to suggested here: wildcard * in CSS for classes

// For matching strings starting with a certain thing notice the ^=
$messageElement = $crawler->filter('input[name^="myField[0]"]');

// For matching strings containing with a certain thing notice the *=
$messageElement = $crawler->filter('input[name*="myField[0]"]');

edited May 23 '17 at 12:00

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answered Oct 27 '16 at 20:21

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can't believe I didn't think to use quotes - perfect thanks – myol Oct 28 '16 at 08:13

Escaping special characters in symfony css selector or using wildcard

1 Answers1