Splinter find_by_xpath: using regex for element text()

Question

I am running a browser test with splinter and have a page with a large table. I want to locate all <tr> elements that contain a <td> with some nicely-formatted date in their text, like the one highlighted here:

It's easy to find the rows with specific text, e.g., via:

browser.find_by_xpath('//tr[.//td[contains(text(), "September")]]')

So then I tried something like the suggestions here to find text() with the general date pattern (help with simplifying my regex is welcome, too):

exp = '[A-Z][a-z]+\\s[1-9]{1,2},\\s[0-9]{4}'
browser.find_by_xpath('//tr[.//td[matches(text(), "{0}")]]'.format(exp))

This doesn't work (and I did verify that the regex works in isolation). Nor does:

browser.find_by_xpath('//tr[.//td[matches(., "{0}")]]'.format(exp))

Provided my browser allows XPath 2.0, how can I find the elements correctly?

What browser and browser version are you using? – alecxe Oct 21 '15 at 17:30 — alecxe, Oct 21 '15 at 17:30

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-21T17:39:50.847

Both latest Firefox and Chrome don't support XPath 2.0. Here are the relevant open issues:

You have to approach it without using matches(). For instance, you may filter the list of tr you find in Python by taking the EAFP approach and using datetime.strptime(). Sample:

from datetime import datetime

for tr in browser.find_by_tag("tr"):
    sorted_on = tr.find_by_css(".sorted-on")

    try:
        datetime.strptime(sorted_on.text, "%B %d, %Y")
    except ValueError:
        continue

Splinter find_by_xpath: using regex for element text()

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