[Feature]: Ignore special characters like softhyphens when locating by name

[lubomsky]

🚀 Feature Request

We have exact attribute to match accessible name more or less strict. And that is handy.
But I encountered difficulties locating elements that contain special characters like soft hyphen or zero width space.
Of course I can provide full name with \u00AD, but it is not readable:
super\u00ADcali\u00ADfrag\u00ADilistic\u00ADexpial\u00ADidocious
vs
super­cali­frag­ilistic­expial­idocious

It would be nice to have another attribute working along with name and exact to handle those special non-printing/formatting characters.

Example

page.getByRole(AriaRole.COLUMNHEADER, 
               new Page.GetByRoleOptions().setName("super­cali­frag­ilistic­expial­idocious")
                                          .setIgnoreNonPrinting(true)) // or setIgnoreFormattingChars or whatever...
    .click();

or may be set to true as default (similarly to exact).

Chaining with setExact(true) may be tricky here - maybe its naming is not the best for the purpose.

Motivation

To have more capabilities for locating elements by accessible name, keeping in mind this advice:

When to use role locators
We recommend prioritizing role locators to locate elements, as it is the closest way to how users and assistive technology perceive the page.

Users don't see and assistive technology does not read "\u00AD" etc...

[Skn0tt]

I'll discuss it with the team. This is probably the area in the code where we'd have to look implementation-wise:

playwright/packages/playwright-core/src/server/injected/roleSelectorEngine.ts

Line 153 in aca3fb2

const accessibleName = normalizeWhiteSpace(getElementAccessibleName(element, !!options.includeHidden));

[Skn0tt]

How does your application end up with softhyphens in the accessible name, anyways?

[Skn0tt]

getElementAccessibleName refers to "Flat strings" from the ARIA spec:

Flat string: A string of characters where all carriage returns, newlines, tabs, and form-feeds are replaced with a single space, and multiple spaces are reduced to a single space. The string contains only character data; it does not contain any markup.

I'd consider Softhyphens markup, so going by the spec we should probably remove them.

[Skn0tt]

chromium seems to not remove them, but we discussed that we should