Getting text of a table quickly in Selenium

Question

I'm trying to parse a number of columns in a table into a dictionary using Selenium, but what I have seems slow. I'm using python, Selenium 2.0, and webdriver.Chrome()

table = self.driver.find_element_by_id("thetable")
    # now get all the TR elements from the table
    all_rows = table.find_elements_by_tag_name("tr")

    # and iterate over them, getting the cells
    for row in all_rows:
        cells = row.find_elements_by_tag_name("td")
        # slowwwwwwwwwwwwww
        dict_value = {'0th': cells[0].text,
                 '1st': cells[1].text,
                 '2nd': cells[2].text,
                 '3rd': cells[3].text,
                 '6th': cells[6].text,
                 '7th': cells[7].text,
                 '10th': cells[10].text}

The problem seems to be getting the 'text' attribute of each td element. Is there a faster way?

Answer 1

Alternative option.

If later (after the loop), you don't need interactiveness that selenium provides you with - you can pass the current HTML source code of the page to lxml.html, which is known for it's speed. Example:

import lxml.html

root = lxml.html.fromstring(driver.page_source)
for row in root.xpath('.//table[@id="thetable"]//tr'):
    cells = row.xpath('.//td/text()')
    dict_value = {'0th': cells[0],
                  '1st': cells[1],
                  '2nd': cells[2],
                  '3rd': cells[3],
                  '6th': cells[6],
                  '7th': cells[7],
                  '10th': cells[10]}