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?

Answer 1

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.

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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

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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