How can I get the current contents of an element in webdriver

I must be thinking about this wrong.

I want to get the contents of an element, in this case a formfield, on a page that I am accessing with Webdriver/Selenium 2

Here is my broken code:

Element=driver.find_element_by_id(ElementID)
print Element
print Element.text


here is the result:

<selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement object at 0x9c2392c>


(Notice the blank line)
I know that element has contents since I just stuffed them in there with the previous command using .sendkeys and I can see them on the actual web page while the script runs.

but I need to get the contents back into data.

What can I do to read this? Preferably in a generic fashion so that I can pull contents from varied types of elements.

5 Answers
5

I believe prestomanifesto was on the right track. It depends on what kind of element it is. You would need to use element.get_attribute('value') for input elements and element.text to return the text node of an element.

element.get_attribute('value')

element.text

You could check the WebElement object with element.tag_name to find out what kind of element it is and return the appropriate value.

element.tag_name

This should help you figure out:

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('http://www.w3c.org')
element = driver.find_element_by_name('q')
element.send_keys('hi mom')

element_text = element.text
element_attribute_value = element.get_attribute('value')

print element
print 'element.text: 0'.format(element_text)
print 'element.get_attribute('value'): 0'.format(element_attribute_value)
driver.quit()


element.get_attribute('innerHTML')


My answer is based on this answer: How can I get the current contents of an element in webdriver
just more like copy-paste.

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('http://www.w3c.org')
element = driver.find_element_by_name('q')
element.send_keys('hi mom')

element_text = element.text
element_attribute_value = element.get_attribute('value')

print (element)
print ('element.text: 0'.format(element_text))
print ('element.get_attribute('value'): 0'.format(element_attribute_value))


element = driver.find_element_by_css_selector('.description.expand_description > p')
element_text = element.text
element_attribute_value = element.get_attribute('value')

print (element)
print ('element.text: 0'.format(element_text))
print ('element.get_attribute('value'): 0'.format(element_attribute_value))
driver.quit()


I know when you said "contents" you didn't mean this, but if you want to find all the values of all the attributes of a webelement this is a pretty nifty way to do that with javascript in python:

everything = b.execute_script(
'var element = arguments[0];'
'var attributes = ;'
'for (index = 0; index < element.attributes.length; ++index) '
' attributes[element.attributes[index].name] = element.attributes[index].value ;'
'var properties = ;'
'properties[0] = attributes;'
'var element_text = element.textContent;'
'properties[1] = element_text;'
'var styles = getComputedStyle(element);'
'var computed_styles = ;'
'for (index = 0; index < styles.length; ++index) '
' var value_ = styles.getPropertyValue(styles[index]);'
' computed_styles[styles[index]] = value_ ;'
'properties[2] = computed_styles;'
'return properties;', element)


you can also get some extra data with element.__dict__.

element.__dict__

I think this is about all the data you'd ever want to get from a webelement.

In Java its Webelement.getText() . Not sure about python.

python

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