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Handling Selectors and Element Interaction in Playwright
Selectors are at the heart of browser automation. They define how your test scripts interact with elements on a webpage, and Playwright offers a robust and flexible selector engine to handle this. In this blog post, we will explore Playwright’s selector engine and learn how to use different types of selectors — CSS, XPath, and Text selectors — to interact with elements on the page. We will also dive into best practices for writing maintainable and stable selectors and how to interact with forms, buttons, and other common elements.
Previous Article: Basic Browser and Page Interactions with Playwright
1. Understanding Playwright’s Selector Engine
Playwright provides several types of selectors to interact with web elements. The most common types are:
- CSS selectors: The default and most widely used selector type.
- XPath selectors: Allows querying the DOM using XPath expressions.
- Text selectors: Lets you locate elements based on visible text content.
The power of Playwright’s selector engine comes from its flexibility. You can use a combination of these selectors to target elements on the page precisely. Let’s break down each type and when to use them.
