How to write valid XPath expression using AND condition - selenium

Question

On multiple environments of the app which we are testing, the ID of one element is different. I have this div ID
CoredataForm:sec2_natural:grid1:left_section_natural:profession:selectProfession_auto_complete_force:ajax
Bold marked parts of the id, is the part which is same for all the environments.
How should I write xpath expression which would fit to all of them?
I used this
xpath="//div[starts-with(#id,'CoredataForm:sec2_natural:grid1:left_section_natural:profession:selectProfession') and ends-with(#id,'ajax')]"
but it doesn't work. Maybe another question: how can I use contains() function with multiple wildcards?

Answer 1

Your XPath might not work if your tool supports XPath1.0 only cause fn:ends-with is not available in XPath1.0
You can try to replace ends-with with contains in your XPath as
"//div[starts-with(#id,'CoredataForm:sec2_natural:grid1:left_section_natural:profession:selectProfession') and contains(#id,'ajax')]"

Answer 2

Selenium supports only XPath 1, but as JaSON says, ends-with is only available in XPath 2 and later versions.
However, it's possible to check that a string ends with another string using just the XPath 1 functions substring and string-length. The substring function returns a substring starting at a particular character location. The first character in the string has position 0, so substring('abc', 1)='bc'
If a string $s1 ends with another string$s2, then the following is true:
substring($s1, string-length($s1) - string-length($s2)) = $s2
So this expression should work for you (broken into multiple lines, for readability):
//div[
starts-with(
#id,
'CoredataForm:sec2_natural:grid1:left_section_natural:profession:selectProfession'
)
and
substring(
#id,
string-length(#id) - string-length('ajax')
) = 'ajax'
]