escape colon in Xpath search

Question

Hi,

I'm using Hpricot with selenium I have this html input element:

<input id="foo:bar"/>

And I'm trying to get this value with this Xpath expression:

source = Hpricot(@selenium.get_html_source)
source.search("//input[@id='foo:bar']")

but it is not finding anything because of the colon. I have seen that the Xpath expression cannot contain any colon. I have tried to escape it in different ways but it doesn't work.

Is there any way to escape it or avoid this problem? I cannot change the values in the html so the foo:bar has to be this way, with the colon. But I need to find this element somehow.

Any ideas?

thanks

Answer 1

You may be able to achieve this with a css locator, and specify that the id contains a particular string (the fact this is matching a string should remove any weirdness caused by the colon). This locator worked for me when I tried it in Selenium IDE:

css=input[id:contains('foo:bar')]

Answer 2

You don't need to use XPath for this locator, as long as the id is unique you can simply use:

id=foo:bar

Even then, the id= prefix is not necessary as it will be assumed by default.