Get HTML source of WebElement in Selenium WebDriver using Python

Question

I'm using the Python bindings to run Selenium WebDriver:

from selenium import webdriver wd = webdriver.Firefox() 

I know I can grab a webelement like so:

elem = wd.find_element_by_css_selector('#my-id') 

And I know I can get the full page source with...

wd.page_source 

But is there a way to get the "element source"?

elem.source   # <-- returns the HTML as a string 

The Selenium WebDriver documentation for Python are basically non-existent and I don't see anything in the code that seems to enable that functionality.

What is the best way to access the HTML of an element (and its children)?

Answer 1

You can read the innerHTML attribute to get the source of the content of the element or outerHTML for the source with the current element.

Python:

element.get_attribute('innerHTML') 

Java:

elem.getAttribute("innerHTML"); 

C#:

element.GetAttribute("innerHTML"); 

Ruby:

element.attribute("innerHTML") 

JavaScript:

element.getAttribute('innerHTML'); 

PHP:

$element->getAttribute('innerHTML'); 

It was tested and worked with the ChromeDriver.