How can I get the text in Selenium?

Question

I want to get the text of an element in selenium. First I did this:

team1_names = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
    EC.presence_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".home span"))
)

for kir in team1_names:
    print(kir.text)

It didn’t work out. So I tried this:

team1_name = driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('.home span')
print(team1_name.getText())

so team1_name.text doesn’t work either. So what's wrong with it?

Hello there, `.text` is the correct way to get the text of an object however we need more context. When you say "it didn't wok out" and it "doesn't work", what happens? Is there an error? - Also: What's the html source look like? Are you getting the right object (i.e. the object with the text)? Can you share a link to the page so someone else can have a look directly and not guess at an answer? — RichEdwards, Aug 01 '20 at 16:29

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 15 '22 at 01:14

You need to take care of a couple of things here:

presence_of_element_located() is the expectation for checking that an element is present on the DOM of a page. This does not necessarily mean that the element is visible.
Additionally, presence_of_element_located() returns a WebElement, not a list. Hence, iterating through for won't work.

Solution

As a solution you need to induce WebDriverWait for the visibility_of_element_located(), and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using CSS_SELECTOR and text attribute:

print(WebDriverWait(browser, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".home span"))).text)

Using XPATH and get_attribute():

print(WebDriverWait(browser, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//*[@class='home']//span"))).get_attribute("innerHTML"))

Note: You have to add the following imports:

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

You can find a relevant discussion in How to retrieve the text of a WebElement using Selenium - Python

Outro

Link to useful documentation:

The get_attribute() method Gets the given attribute or property of the element.
The text attribute returns The text of the element.
Difference between text and innerHTML using Selenium

How can I get the text in Selenium?

1 Answers1

Solution

Outro