How to grab a specific column from a web table in Selenium

Question

I'm working in C# selenium and I want to grab a certain column from a web table for testing. I'm curious if you can use

row.FindElements(By.TagName("wanted_col_name"));

to grab a certain column by name or to grab it by the column number

Table shown on the webpage

HTML of the site

I specifically want to grab the elements from product line, combine them with part number and then put the strings into an array. An example of this output would be

BCA/A1
BCA/A2
PEN/30

Of course, the DELIVERED BY NOON, but I don't know how to exclude it.

The code I have right now prints out every element of the table, but doesn't work when I try to print out only the column I want as it includes the entire row in a single string and the DELIVERED BY NOON string.

            IWebElement tableElement = driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//*[@id='InvoiceTable']/tbody"));
            IList<IWebElement> tableRow = tableElement.FindElements(By.TagName("tr"));
            IList<IWebElement> rowTD;

            foreach(IWebElement row in tableRow)
            {
                rowTD = row.FindElements(By.TagName("td"));

                foreach (IWebElement col in rowTD)
                {
                    TestContext.WriteLine(col.Text + " ... \n\n");
                }
            }

Answer 1

This code does what you want for a W3C website about HTML tables, tested and working:

        driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp");

        var table = driver.FindElement(By.Id("customers"));
        var rows = table.FindElements(By.TagName("tr"));

        foreach (var row in rows)
        {
            var tds= row.FindElements(By.TagName("td"));
            if (tds.Count > 2)
                Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1}", tds[0].Text, tds[2].Text);
        }

It works by selecting the customers table and then it concatenates the first column's text with the 3rd column in same format as your example.

I've added a check for tds.Count in the foreach loop because the first tablerow in the W3C demo page has a table header, so it returns 0 tds.

I hope this helps.