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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

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

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()