Selenium: test if element contains some text

Question

With Selenium IDE, how can I test if an element's inner text contains a specific string? For example:

<p id="fred">abcde</p>
'id=fred' contains "bcd" = true)

score 24 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 29 '12 at 09:35

24

The Selenium-IDE documentation is helpful in this situation.

The command you are looking for is assertText, the locator would be id=fred and the text for example *bcd*.

answered Mar 29 '12 at 09:35

Petr Janeček

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even though I got it slightly before you I'll give you the answer points. – Mark W Mar 29 '12 at 12:01
@Slanec is there any thing, that i can search the text and click on it? – Emmanuel Angelo.R May 08 '15 at 09:59
2

The key bit of the documentation is further down in [Matching Text Patterns](http://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/02_selenium_ide.jsp#matching-text-patterns) which talks about the wildcards. – icc97 Mar 07 '16 at 09:05
Wildcards don't seem to work anymore (in 2023) – Sockie Apr 28 '23 at 18:42

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 29 '12 at 09:34

5

It can be done with a simple wildcard:

verifyText
id="fred"
*bcd*

See selenium IDE Doc

answered Mar 29 '12 at 09:34

Mark W

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Oh. Right at the same moment. – Petr Janeček Mar 29 '12 at 09:35
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Yes. Less than a minute too slow. Hehe – Mark W Mar 29 '12 at 10:30

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 29 '12 at 15:42

4

You can also use:

assertElementPresent
css=p#fred:contains('bcd')

answered Mar 29 '12 at 15:42

Aleh Douhi

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Thank you, this was what I needed: `css=p:contains('foo')`. However, I'm told that it's deprecated. – LarsH Sep 13 '12 at 20:49

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 19 '21 at 15:09

3

A solution with XPath:

Command: verify element present

Target: xpath=//div[@id='fred' and contains(.,'bcd')]

answered Aug 19 '21 at 15:09

Karima Rafes

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 29 '12 at 08:57

0

Are you able to use jQuery if so try something like

$("p#fred:contains('bcd')").css("text-decoration", "underline");

answered Mar 29 '12 at 08:57

The Angry Saxon

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how would this be possible with selenium IDE? – Mark W Mar 29 '12 at 09:00

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 29 '12 at 09:08

It seems regular expressions might work:

"The simplest character set is a character. The regular expression "the" contains three
character sets: "t," "h" and "e". It will match any line with the string "the" inside it.
This would also match the word "other". "

(From site: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Regular.html)

If you are using visual studio there is functionality for evaluating strings with regular expressions of ALL kinds (not just contains):

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

Regex.IsMatch("YourInnerText", @"^[a-zA-Z]+$");

The expression I posted will check if the string contains ONLY letters.

Your regular expression would then according to my link be "bcd" or some string you construct at runtime. Or:

Regex.IsMatch("YourInnerText", @"bcd");

(Something like that anyway)

Hope it helped.

score -1 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 29 '12 at 09:32

-1

You can use the command assertTextPresent or verifyText

answered Mar 29 '12 at 09:32

Joand

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yes but I was trying to get a partial match, not full. Also it's not just that command that can be used. – Mark W Mar 29 '12 at 09:35

Selenium: test if element contains some text

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