How to select an option from dropdown select

For native selectboxes, my solution was to execute some JS on the page itself:

await page.evaluate(() => {
  document.querySelector('select option:nth-child(2)').selected = true;
})

For dropdown component, I think we should consider 2 situations:

  • native HTML select element
  • component written by JS, composed of a button and a list of options, take bootstrap dropdown as example

For the second situation, I think click can solve the problem.

For the first situation, I just found 2 ways to do this:

  1. page.select
  2. elementHandle.type (notice updated on 27/04/2018)

page.select is a new feature added in v0.12.0.

For example you have a select element:

<label>Choose One:
    <select name="choose1">
        <option value="val1">Value 1</option>
        <option value="val2">Value 2</option>
        <option value="val3">Value 3</option>
    </select>
</label>

You have two ways to select second option 'Value 2'.

// use page.select
await page.select('select[name="choose1"]', 'val2');

// use elementHandle.type
const selectElem = await page.$('select[name="choose1"]');
await selectElem.type('Value 2');

Normally elementHandle.type is used to type in text in input textbox, but since it

Focuses the element, and then sends a keydown, keypress/input, and keyup event for each character in the text.

select HTML element has input event, so that this method works.

And I personally think elementHandle.type is better since it's not required to know the option value attribute, only the label/name what man can see.

27/04/2018 Updated

I previously used elementHandle.type only on Mac OSX. Recently, my colleague reported a bug related to this. He is using Linux/Win. Also, we are both using puppeteer v1.3.0.

After trial and error, we found that this elementHandle.type can assign the value to the <select> element, but this won't trigger the change event of the element.
So I no longer recommend using elementHandle.type on <select>.

Finally, we followed this comment to dispatch change event manually. It's like:

// use manually trigger change event
await page.evaluate((optionElem, selectElem) => {
    optionElem.selected = true;
    const event = new Event('change', {bubbles: true});
    selectElem.dispatchEvent(event);
}, optionElem, selectElem);

Puppeteer v0.13.0 has page.select() method, which does exactly that. You just have to give it the value to select. So, assuming you have an <option value="my-value"> in your <select>:

await page.select('#telCountryInput', 'my-value')

Tags:

Puppeteer