How to Evaluate Puppeteer Page Elements with Partial URL Matching

Other Questions Puppeteer
1

I am using Puppeteer to select an anchor element on a webpage, but I encounter a challenge. My JSON data contains only a specific keyword (for instance, “AlphaBeta”) without the accompanying dynamic part (like an ID). This causes difficulty when trying to match the complete href attribute, which normally includes a changing segment, such as ‘/character/UID/’.

Below is a revised example:

const linkElement = await page.waitForSelector('a[href*="/character/UNIQUE/AlphaBeta"]');

Is there a way in Puppeteer to ignore or bypass the dynamic portion of the URL while evaluating the page so that only the static keyword is used for matching? Any insights or alternative methods would be greatly appreciated.

2

hey, u could check for href matching using regex inside page.evaluate. basically filter all links and return the one whose href includes ‘alphabeta’ ignoring the dynamic part. works fine for me.

3

In my experience it is indeed possible to work around the challenge of matching a dynamic URL portion. One approach that worked for me was to use a selector that only focuses on the static part of the URL, for example by selecting elements using something like ‘a[href*=“AlphaBeta”]’. After retrieving these elements, you could further narrow down your target via additional filter conditions within page.evaluate. This technique allowed me to bypass the challenge of the unpredictable segment in the URL while still pinpointing the desired anchor element.

4

I encountered a similar issue during one of my projects and found that an effective method was to handle most of the filtering in the browser context. I used a simple selector based on the static part of the URL to get a set of candidate elements. Within page.evaluate, I then performed further checks on the URL to ignore the dynamic segments. Although this meant adding a bit of extra code, it provided me with the necessary control, flexibility, and clarity to ensure the right element was selected without overly complicating the selector.

5

i ended up using a regex inside page.evaluate to filter out the dynamic part. it checks for the ‘alphabeta’ bit and ignores the rest. works for me even though its not the cleanest aproach