select any element that has text in webdriver

Question

I'm looking to implement a general localisation test using webdriver and my idea is:

1. Select all elements that contain text
2. Use a java language identification library to verify that the text is in some specific language

I looked up various ways to select elements using text but everything documented seems to show ways of locating using specific text using contains() or text()

I thought the following would work:

//*[contains(text(), '')]

but that selects everything whether it has text or not. It also selects elements in the header. I want to select all visible text on the page, extract that text and pass it through the language identification library element by element.

Answer 1

You can use this XPath

//*[text() != ""]

This will give you all the elements with non-empty text.
So that

List<WebElement> list = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[text() != '']"));

will give you a list of all web elements on the page containing texts.
UPD
If you wish to get only elements containing texts themselves, you can exclude the elements containing texts in their children only by this code:

List<WebElement> real = new ArrayList<>();
for(WebElement element : list){
    js = (JavascriptExecutor)driver;
    String text = js.executeScript("""
    return jQuery(arguments[0]).contents().filter(function() {
        return this.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE;
    }).text();
    """, element);
    if(text.length()>0){
        real.add(element);
}

The final list of elements will be in real list.
The idea is from here. Translated from Python to Java according to this syntax