Selenium find_elements_by_css_selector returns an empty list

Question

I'm trying to select all the ids which contain coupon-link keyword with the following script.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://udemycoupon.discountsglobal.com/coupon-category/free-2/")
elems = driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('[id~=\"coupon-link\"]')
print(elems)

But I got an empty list [] as the result. What's wrong with my css_selector?

I've tested that find_elements_by_css_selector('[id=\"coupon-link-92654\"]') works successfully. But I want to select all the coupon-links, not just one of them.

I referenced the document at w3schools.com.

Learner · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-26 08:13:25Z

1

Selenium CSS only support three partial match operators viz.- $^*.

CSS partial match expression is not correct- Use * or ^ details at here and here. You can use xpath too.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://udemycoupon.discountsglobal.com/coupon-category/free-2/")

#select by css
#try *
css_lnks = [i.get_attribute('href') for i in driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('[id*=coupon-link]')]
#or try ^
#css_lnks = [i.get_attribute('href') for i in driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('[id^=coupon-link]')]

#select by xpath
xpth_lnks = [i.get_attribute('href') for i in driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//a[contains(@id,'coupon-link-')]")]

print xpth_lnks
print css_lnks

edited Dec 26, 2015 at 8:13

answered Dec 26, 2015 at 8:04

Learner

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1 Comment

Brian Over a year ago

Thank you :). I wish I can know how to use ~= correctly. After reading the descriptions at w3schools.com, I cannot tell the difference between ~= and *=.

BoltClock · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-27 04:38:11Z

1

The ~= selector selects by value delimited by spaces. In that sense, it works similarly to a class selector matching the class attribute.

Since IDs don't usually have spaces in them (because an id attribute can only specify one ID at a time), it doesn't make sense to use ~= with the id attribute.

If you just want to select an element by a prefix in its ID, use ^=:

elems = driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('[id^=\"coupon-link\"]')

answered Dec 27, 2015 at 4:38

BoltClock

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