Selenium - How to find an element by part of the placeholder value?

Question

Is there any way to find an element by a part of the placeholder value? And ideally, case insensitive.

<input id="id-9" placeholder="some TEXT">

Search by the following function doesn't work

browser.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value="//input[@placeholder='some te']")

Prophet · Accepted Answer · 2023-01-01T10:05:33.403

4

You can always use contains instead of equals, as following:

browser.find_element(By.XPATH, "//input[contains(@placeholder,'some te')]")

To make it case-insensitive you can use translate function, as following:

browser.find_element(By.XPATH, "//input/@placeholder[contains(translate(., 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'),'some te')]")

Case-insensitive contains Xpath is taken from this question

edited Jan 01 '23 at 10:05

answered Jan 01 '23 at 09:59

Prophet

32,350
22
54
79

You can also use css: `input[placeholder^="some te"]` – zaki98 Jan 01 '23 at 10:11
Right, `^` in css is similar to `contains` in XPath. But this question was about XPath, not CSS – Prophet Jan 01 '23 at 10:14
@zaki98 oh, thanks a lot! Does `^` also work for case insensitive search? – Mike Jan 01 '23 at 10:24
@Mike AFAIK no, similarly to regular `contains` in XPath. – Prophet Jan 01 '23 at 10:33
@Mike i added an answer since it may help other people too – zaki98 Jan 01 '23 at 10:36

zaki98 · Answer 2 · 2023-01-02T17:25:24.263

2

@Prophet's answer is good, but I wanted to add CSS case too since it may be helpful. You can use ^= to search for attributes starting with certain keyword and $= for attribute starting with certain keywrd and *= for attribute containing a keyword.

browser.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'input[placeholder*="some te"]')

You can make it case-insensitive by adding i before closing the bracket

browser.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'input[placeholder*="some te" i]')

edited Jan 02 '23 at 17:25

answered Jan 01 '23 at 10:35

zaki98

1,048
8
13

Thank you! But is everything correct? I'm getting the error `selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: invalid selector: An invalid or illegal selector was specified` – Mike Jan 02 '23 at 16:20
@Mike really sorry i had a syntax error and i used the wrong selector it should be working now i tested it – zaki98 Jan 02 '23 at 17:27

Selenium - How to find an element by part of the placeholder value?

2 Answers2