How to fill a text input without emptying its content?

use the new presssequentially api: https://playwright.dev/docs/api/class-locator#locator-press-sequentially

Unfortunately it seems to behave the same. The only way I managed to make it work is by combining it with locator.press() So basically doing this:

const inputField = page.getByRole('textbox');
await inputField.press('ArrowRight'); // I guess this cancels the "selectAll" applied on the content?
await inputField.pressSequentially(' change');

Any chance an option like fill(' change', { clear: false }) would be possible to add? I feel like it would be a simpler api 🙂

looks like a great feature request!

Cool! How do we handle feature requests in this project? Is it enough to mention it here, or should it be an issue or a discussion on Github?

Ah, found it, there is an issue template on Github 👍

Thought this is where you need to use press..? SetFocus press('end') then send your new characters, has worked fine for me in the past with no issues, and should be the press off locator... if not they you are asking for issues...?

Yes, it does work, it's basically the option I show above. The downside is that you have to use pressSequentially instead of fill, which is less performant. And the docs say to use pressSequentially only for "special keyboard handling", which is not the case here. I tried to open a feature request, but it was not really received as I hoped... https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/issues/27484 🤷‍♂️ This is not blocking me, I was just hoping for a more efficient approach to do this 🙂

Might say the docs are not clear, or you're reading it the confusion the docs provide. If fill doesn't work, then i'd assert you are doing "special keyboard handling" simply for the reason fill() doesn't work...

Is there anything wrong with grabbing what's in the box and calling .fill() with what was already in there, plus what you want to put on the end?

what's the use case for just adding to the end of the text box?

I think locator.type(str) is what you need

locator.type() is deprecated now, and has been replaced with pressSequentially(), which was suggested already 😄

@d3333333 I was reading "special keyboard handling" as for example using combo keys, or things like that.I don't consider editing existing value as being special keyboard handling 🤷‍♂️

@tphillips8117 The use case would be to just extend a field's existing value, instead of replacing it completely. For example, I might want to take a screenshot of a form, that has a big textarea. And I want to see how it looks like when the textarea has a couple more lines. Instead of having to retype everything, I would prefer to just add the necessary content.