Selecting elements whose attribute begins with something in XPath

java html xhtml xpath

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?

Ripon Al Wasim

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

Michael Bazos

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/')]")

above link is dead but here's another function reference that isn't: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XPath/Functions