How to find an element by the variable title using Selenium and Python

Question

Building a scraper with selenium in python. Trying to select a number of buttons in sequence that have sequential titles of the form 'Race n' where n is an integer.

I want to be able to do something like:

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("a[title*=race_i]").click()

where the variable race_i = 'Race ' + str(i)

Is it possible to feed the css or xpath lookup a variable, rather than a plain string? The number of buttons varies so I need this function to be adaptable and work for any value of n.

Answer 1

How about you just concat the variable to the xpath/css selector?

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("a[title*=" + race_i + "]").click()

Answer 2

Use format function such as

for i in range(1,10):
 driver.find_element_by_css_selector("a[title*=race_{}]".format(i)).click()

Answer 3

To find an element through the variable title you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• css_selector:

  for i in range(1,5):
      driver.find_element_by_css_selector("a[title*='race_'"+ str(i) +"]").click()
  

• xpath:

  for i in range(1,5):
      driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[contains(@title, "race_{}")]'.format(i)).click()