How to get the text from a webpage element using Selenium

Question

I am trying to get a series of text from a web element, but unable to.

The HTML code is as follows:

<span class="versionInfo">
  <span class="menu-highight">SoftFEPVis (GUI): </span> == $0
  "1.6.4"
  </span>

Where SoftFEPVis (GUI): and 1.6.4 are the texts which I would like to be able extract.

I am able to locate the element, and print out its class (menu-highlight), but un-able to extract SoftFEPVis (GUI): and 1.6.4.

I tried :

Version_Number = Browser.find_element(By.XPATH,'//[@id="versionDropDown"]/div/span[3]/span').getText()

and got an error:

'WebElement' object has no attribute getText.

Please help.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 09 '22 at 19:30

1

Instead of using .getText() you could use:

.get_attribute('innerText')

or

.get_attribute('innerHtml')

or

.text

If it helps, here is a more in-depth discussion of the topic: Given a (python) selenium WebElement can I get the innerText?

answered Aug 09 '22 at 19:30

Eissen Posso

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 09 '22 at 20:35

getText() is a Selenium Java client method, where as from your code trials and the error message presumably you are using Selenium Python client.

Solution

To print the text SoftFEPVis (GUI): and 1.6.4 you can use the text attribute and you can use either of the following locator strategies:

Using css_selector and get_attribute("innerHTML"):

print(Browser.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "span.versionInfo").text)

Using xpath and text attribute:

print(Browser.find_element(By.XPATH, "//span[@class='versionInfo']").text)

Note : You have to add the following imports :

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By