find element in selenium by sub string

Question

I am coding in java with selenium and i am stuck. I have to find element by ID, the Id of the element is like this "msi_num_create-copy" (the num is changing every time), there is a way to find the element by part of the Id?

Answer 1

yes you would need to use either css selector or xpath :

XPATH would be :

//*[contains(@id, '_create-copy') and starts-with(@id, 'msi')]

and use it like this :

WebElement someEle = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[contains(@id, '_create-copy') and starts-with(@id, 'msi')]"));
someEle.click(); or someEle.sendKeys("some string");