Selenium Tip - Using Regular Expressions

This comes straight out of the LMN Selenium classes we offer. A tip to help you find html elements that have the same series of letters in them. This is a small screen shot from one of the applications we built to filter news articles for us, determine the location and put it on a map.

Notice the two rows that have the letters bomb. How would you verify the existence of each element?

<a target="_blank" href="http://news.google.com/news/url?fd=R&amp;sa=T&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.topnews.in%2Fsuicide-bombing-iraqi-football-stadium-2261845&amp;usg=AFQjCNGt7-LevFBRrBlwKot-8QL5ymhpOA">Suicide bombing at Iraqi football stadium - TopNews</a>

<a target="_blank" href="http://news.google.com/news/url?fd=R&amp;sa=T&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2Fstories%2F2010%2F05%2F15%2F2900299.htm%3Fsection%3Dworld&amp;usg=AFQjCNG9SJlQwiS55Jv77lp8Nb5OhVwOaQ">Deadly bomb blast hits packed football stadium - ABC Online</a>

Find the link with the word bombing and then the one with the word bomb.

Selenium IDE:

Command	Target	Value
verifyElementPresent	css=a:contains(“bomb”)
verifyElementPresent	css=a:contains(“^bomb$”)

Selenium RC - jUnit

verifyTrue(selenium.isElementPresent("css=a:contains(‘^bomb$’)"));

The ^ means start with. The $ means ends with. This is called regular expression language. This combination of caret bomb dollar sign is the compete expression and will find the exact word bomb.

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