Filter for a class and role in Playwright?

I want to filter for a link with the navbar__brand class on the Playwright website - via Playwright:

My code:

test("homepage has title and links to intro page", async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto("https://playwright.dev/");

  const links = page.getByRole("link").locator(".navbar__brand");

  const count = await links.count();
  console.log("count is " + count); // zero instead of the expected one!
});

What am I doing wrong? Why doesn't it find the link?

It's not finding the link because the locator is only searching children of the <a> element, already found by getByRole. In other words, it can't find itself in its children.

If I understand your HTML correctly, the :scope pseudoselector should work, which essentially lets an element query itself as well as its children:

import {expect, test} from "@playwright/test"; // ^1.46.1

test("nav link has text 'hello world'", async ({page}) => {
  const html = `<a class="navbar__brand" href="/">hello world</a>`;
  await page.setContent(html); // for demonstration

  const navLink = page
    .getByRole("link")
    .locator(":scope.navbar__brand"); // or ".navbar__brand:scope"

  await expect(navLink).toHaveText("hello world");
});

Of course, page.getByRole("a.navbar__brand") is possible but less of a best practice web-first selection than selecting by role. Then again, .navbar__brand isn't web-first either, so ideally you'd combine everything into one page.getByRole("link", {name: "link text"}) call.