Locating an element with dynamic ID using Selenium and Python

Question

I need to find an element by ID "start-ads", but the numbers at the end change every time. Is it possible to search for an element not by the whole ID, but only by its part?

Full element id: <div id="start-ads-202308">

Answer 1

To identify the following element:

<div id="start-ads-202308">

considering the static part of the value of id attribute you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using css_selector:

  element = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div[id^='start-ads-']")
  

  where ^ denotes starts-with

• Using xpath:

  element = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//div[starts-with(@id, 'start-ads-')]")
  

Answer 2

You can use find_element_by_css_selector and use a CSS selector that matches using a prefix

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("div[id^='start-ads-']")