Selecting elements whose attribute begins with something in XPath

Question

As the title says, is it possible to select elements in XPath that only begin with a certain string, but perhaps do not end with the same?

For example there are 3 anchor elements:

<a href="buy.php/onething"></a><a href="buy.php/twothing"></a><a href="sell.php/anotherthing"></a>

I only want to get anchor elements that begin with 'buy.php/'. I don't think the following will work, will it:

getByXPath("//a[@href='buy.php/']")

How can I do this?

score 174 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 26 '16 at 06:15

174

//a[starts-with(@href, 'buy.php/')]

edited Dec 26 '16 at 06:15

Ripon Al Wasim

answered Jul 21 '10 at 17:13

MooGoo

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 21 '10 at 17:16

3

Not sure if this is exactly the correct syntax but you probably want to use the fn:contains xpath function. Other useful functions you can find here:

getByXPath("//a[fn:contains(@href/text(), 'buy.php/')]")

answered Jul 21 '10 at 17:16

Michael Bazos

above link is dead but here's another function reference that isn't: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XPath/Functions – But those new buttons though.. Apr 14 '17 at 18:11

2 Answers2