Business
Jobs
  • About Us
  • Solutions
    • Job Postings
      Post your job and receive qualified candidates in 48h.
    • Candidate Assessments
      500+ technical and psychological tests, plus anti-fraud.
    • Headhunting
      Tailor-made executive search from start to finish.
    • Payroll + EOR
      Payroll dispersal and EOR across 15+ LATAM countries.
  • Pricing
  • Jobs

0

774
Views
Problem with selecting a specific web element with Playwright in Python

I'm having problems using the selector to specify an html input.

I want that Playwright identifies an Whatsapp TEXTBOX so that i can use it, but there is no ID, or even a CSS element that i can specify.

At first, i tried using the comannd detailed on DOC, getting the elements from the website.

<div title="Search text box" role="textbox" class="_13NKt copyable-text selectable-text" contenteditable="true" data-tab="3" dir="ltr"></div>

But i can't specify the search TEXTBOX to fill, with the example:

element.fill("contact name")

I don't know if this is a syntax problem. Is there another way to specify this element?

about 4 years ago · Juan Pablo Isaza
1 answers
Answer question

0

Problem is, that these are not text or input elements, but divs, which inner HTML is being changed when typing. You can check that, by opening WhatsApp in the browser, opening the dev tools, and typing something into the field.

You can identify those divs via the title attribute, as those seem to be unique: //div[@title="Search text box"]

Playwright cannot change the inner HTML of a div, but you could do via Javascript, which you let evaluate by Playwright.

The Javascript would be (you can evaluate that in the dev tools' console):

document.querySelector('div[title^=\'Search text box\']').innerHTML = 'contact name';

To evaluate this from your python code:

page.evaluate('() => document.querySelector('div[title^=\'Search text box\']').innerHTML = 'contact name'')

See documentation for more details: https://playwright.dev/python/docs/evaluating

about 4 years ago · Juan Pablo Isaza Report
Answer question
Find remote jobs

Discover the new way to find a job!

Top jobs
Top job categories
Business
Post vacancy Pricing Sales
Legal
Terms and conditions Privacy policy
© 2026 PeakU Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Andres GPT
Show me some job opportunities
There's an error!