Selenium get text by xpath

Question

I am trying to copy a text element from a webpage and print it in my console just as a test for a future project.

These are the lines when I get the error:

elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/text()[2]")
print(elem.text)

And the error says:

C:\Users\hp\Desktop\facebook-creator-studio-bot-master\get_cnp.py:12: DeprecationWarning: find_element_by_xpath is deprecated. Please use find_element(by=By.XPATH, value=xpath) instead
  driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/form/input[2]").click()
C:\Users\hp\Desktop\facebook-creator-studio-bot-master\get_cnp.py:13: DeprecationWarning: find_element_by_xpath is deprecated. Please use find_element(by=By.XPATH, value=xpath) instead
  elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/text()[2]")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\hp\Desktop\facebook-creator-studio-bot-master\get_cnp.py", line 13, in <module>
    elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/text()[2]")
  File "C:\Users\hp\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 521, in find_element_by_xpath
    return self.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value=xpath)
  File "C:\Users\hp\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 1248, in find_element
    return self.execute(Command.FIND_ELEMENT, {
  File "C:\Users\hp\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 425, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "C:\Users\hp\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\errorhandler.py", line 247, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: invalid selector: The result of the xpath expression "/html/body/text()[2]" is: [object Text]. It should be an element.
  (Session info: chrome=99.0.4844.82)
Stacktrace:
Backtrace:
        Ordinal0 [0x00769943+2595139]
        Ordinal0 [0x006FC9F1+2148849]
        Ordinal0 [0x005F4528+1066280]
        Ordinal0 [0x005F6E04+1076740]
        Ordinal0 [0x005F6CBE+1076414]
        Ordinal0 [0x005F6F50+1077072]
        Ordinal0 [0x00620D1E+1248542]
        Ordinal0 [0x006211CB+1249739]
        Ordinal0 [0x0064D812+1431570]
        Ordinal0 [0x0063BA34+1358388]
        Ordinal0 [0x0064BAF2+1424114]
        Ordinal0 [0x0063B806+1357830]
        Ordinal0 [0x00616086+1204358]
        Ordinal0 [0x00616F96+1208214]
        GetHandleVerifier [0x0090B232+1658114]
        GetHandleVerifier [0x009C312C+2411516]
        GetHandleVerifier [0x007FF261+560433]
        GetHandleVerifier [0x007FE366+556598]
        Ordinal0 [0x0070286B+2173035]
        Ordinal0 [0x007075F8+2192888]
        Ordinal0 [0x007076E5+2193125]
        Ordinal0 [0x007111FC+2232828]
        BaseThreadInitThunk [0x76CA6359+25]
        RtlGetAppContainerNamedObjectPath [0x77827C24+228]
        RtlGetAppContainerNamedObjectPath [0x77827BF4+180]

Then my chomedrive close. What should be the problem ?

Does this answer your question? [org.openqa.selenium.InvalidSelectorException - \[object Text\]. It should be an element](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38553512/org-openqa-selenium-invalidselectorexception-object-text-it-should-be-an-el) — JaSON, Mar 24 '22 at 16:32

undetected Selenium · Answer 1 · 2022-03-24T12:03:13.380

This error message...

selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidSelectorException: Message: invalid selector: The result of the xpath expression "/html/body/text()[2]" is: [object Text]. It should be an element.

...implies that the locator strategies you have used is an invalid selector as,

driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/text()[2]")

would return the second matching text node where as Selenium supports only elements.

This usecase

If your usecase is to retrieve the text from an element, you need to locate the element uniquely within the DOM Tree and then extract the innerText using get_attribute() as follows:

Using css_selector and get_attribute("innerHTML"):

print(driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "element_cssSelector").get_attribute("innerHTML"))

Using xpath and text attribute:

print(driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "element_xpath").text)

tl; dr

Difference between text and innerHTML using Selenium

Prophet · Answer 2 · 2022-03-24T12:20:47.650

As clearly described in the error trace the problem here is

invalid selector: The result of the xpath expression "/html/body/text()[2]" is: [object Text]. It should be an element.

With print(elem.text) you are trying to apply .text method on elem web element object so driver.find_element_by_xpath() needs a locator to a web element on the web page while "/html/body/text()[2]" is not a valid XPath locator to a web element.
For example ``"/html/body"may be a valid locator to a web element, while/text()refers to atext` attribute value of some web element, but not to a web element object.
UPD
What you can do here is to get the web element, extract it text and then extract the desired text part from there as following:

elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath("/body")
print(elem.text)

This will give you several text string, not only the generated code, unfortunately we can't make better work with selenium since the text you are looking for is sitting inside the body element itself.
You can split the received text after that to extract the code from it.

Any idea how to get the text attribute to be able to use the print method ? — Mihai, Mar 24 '22 at 11:51
Get the element with `driver.find_element_by_xpath()` with a correct XPath to that element and then get the text with `.text` method, as you tried `print(elem.text)`. Your problem here is with invalid XPath — Prophet, Mar 24 '22 at 11:57
I am pretty sure I use the correct XPath as you can see here [link](https://imgur.com/a/qJbjIIC) — Mihai, Mar 24 '22 at 12:03

Selenium get text by xpath

2 Answers2

This usecase

tl; dr