Find all elements that start with 'button-'

Question

I am using Selenium to try and get all ID elements that that start with "button-". What I have tried so far was to use regex to match the "button-" but I get an error stating that TypeError: Object of type 'SRE_Pattern' is not JSON serializable . My code so far is:

all_btns = self.driver.find_elements_by_id(re.compile('^button-?'))

But as mentioned that raises an error. What is the appropriate way of getting all elements when you don't know the full ID, class, css selector etc.?

Answer 1

You could use find_element_by_xpath and starts-with :

find_elements_by_xpath('//*[starts-with(@id, "button-")]')

• //* will match any elements
• [starts-with(@id, "button-")] will filter the elements with a property id that starts with button-

Answer 2

Clément's answers works just fine, but there is also a way to do this with css selectors:

*[id^='button']. 

* matches all tags, just like in xpath and ^= means 'starts with'