puppeteer/website/versioned_docs/version-20.9.0/guides/query-selectors-legacy.md

Query Selectors (legacy)

Queries are the primary mechanism for interacting with the DOM on your site. For example, a typical workflow goes like:

// Import puppeteer
import puppeteer from 'puppeteer';

(async () => {
  // Launch the browser
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();

  // Create a page
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  // Go to your site
  await page.goto('YOUR_SITE');

  // Query for an element handle.
  const element = await page.waitForSelector('div > .class-name');

  // Do something with element...
  await element.click(); // Just an example.

  // Dispose of handle
  await element.dispose();

  // Close browser.
  await browser.close();
})();

CSS

CSS selectors follow the CSS spec of the browser being automated. We provide some basic type deduction for CSS selectors (such as HTMLInputElement for input), but any selector that contains no type information (such as .class-name) will need to be coerced manually using TypeScript's as coercion mechanism.

Example

// Automatic
const element = await page.waitForSelector('div > input');
// Manual
const element = (await page.waitForSelector(
  'div > .class-name-for-input'
)) as HTMLInputElement;

Built-in selectors

Built-in selectors are Puppeteer's own class of selectors for doing things CSS cannot. Every built-in selector starts with a prefix .../ to assist Puppeteer in distinguishing between CSS selectors and a built-in.

Text selectors (text/)

Text selectors will select "minimal" elements containing the given text, even within (open) shadow roots. Here, "minimum" means the deepest elements that contain a given text, but not their parents (which technically will also contain the given text).

Example

// Note we usually need type coercion since the type cannot be deduced, but for text selectors, `instanceof` checks may be better for runtime validation.
const element = await page.waitForSelector('text/My name is Jun');

XPath selectors (xpath/)

XPath selectors will use the browser's native Document.evaluate to query for elements.

Example

// There is not type deduction for XPaths.
const node = await page.waitForSelector('xpath/h2');

ARIA selectors (aria/)

ARIA selectors can be used to find elements with a given ARIA label. These labels are computed using Chrome's internal representation.

Example

const node = await page.waitForSelector('aria/Button name');

Pierce selectors (pierce/)

Pierce selectors will run the querySelector* API on the document and all shadow roots to find an element.

:::danger

Selectors will not partially pierce through shadow roots. See the examples below.

:::

Example

Suppose the HTML is

<div>
  <custom-element>
    <div></div>
  </custom-element>
</div>

Then

// This will be two elements because of the outer and inner div.
expect((await page.$$('pierce/div')).length).toBe(2);

// Partial piercing doesn't work.
expect((await page.$$('pierce/div div')).length).toBe(0);

Custom selectors

Puppeteer provides users the ability to add their own query selectors to Puppeteer using Puppeteer.registerCustomQueryHandler. This is useful for creating custom selectors based on framework objects or other vendor-specific objects.