Since forever bill. Filters like contains does not work in IE. They work perfectly well in firefox/chrome mind you. This is a major drawback and a deal-breaker when you are talking of enterprise level application test automation. All enterprise applications are tested in IE not in firefox.

Also note that Selenium supports XPATH 1.0 which does not support regex. XPATH 2.0 supports regexp and I hope selenium supports this xpath version in the next release.

I have written this JS function that could help people use dom identifiers using full power of regexp. I want to make this into a user-extension but for now will use it as it is.

/*Usage: Copy paste everything in blue after replacing elementClassName,attributeName,attribtePtrn,elemIndex given in green with the appropriate values in the function call. Add the 'dom=' prefix

elementClassName is the tag name like 'input', 'select' etc

attributeName is the name of the attribute within this node that you wish to use as a identifier i.e 'name', 'id' etc

attribtePtrn is the value of the attribute in regex   i.e 'ctl00_middlecontent_radio.*' to refer to all elements that have the attribute value starting with 'ctl00_middlecontent_radio'

elemIndex is the instance of this element in the html page i.e 0,1,2 etc*/

function getLocator(elementClassName,attributeName,attribtePtrn,elemIndex){
var allInputArray = new Array();
var requiredElement;
allInputArray=document.getElementsByTagName(elementClassName);
var i=0;
var index=0;
var requiredIndex=elemIndex;

var pattrn=new RegExp("^"+attribtePtrn+"$");

for(i=0; i<allInputArray.length; i++){
        if (pattrn.test(allInputArray[i].getAttribute(attributeName))){
        if (index==requiredIndex){
         requiredElement=allInputArray[i];
        break;}
                index=index+1;
         }
           
}

return requiredElement;
}

//function call use only one function call; I have added 2 calls to getLocator just for example; replace the parameters with your own values

getLocator("input","id","webButton.*",16); //to refer to the 16th input element that has id starting with 'webButton'
getLocator("input","name","[a-c]{1}tl00_middleContent_Chec.*",2);  //to refer to the 2nd input element that has name starting with any one character either a,b or c followed by 'tl00_middleContent_Chec' //followed by anything

//Don't forget the 'dom=' prefix

Any locator of the form 'xpath=...' does not work in IE. This is common knowledge. Many of the members of this forum have reached this conclusion numerous times.

Please refer to these threads to understand how we reached to this conclusion

http://clearspace.openqa.org/thread/16584

http://clearspace.openqa.org/thread/16715

Also compared to a DOM locator it takes 20 times more time to locate an element based on it's xpath. This fact too is well documented and common knowledge. But I will agree that the performance of xpath locators vary from application to application. I will be most gratefull to you if you could demostrate a working example of xpath locator (filters like contains and start-with) on IE. Also please explain how we can port our Selenium scripts to xpath 2.0 (this ver supports regexp).