How do I get the HTML in an element using Capybara?

Question

I’m writing a cucumber test where I want to get the HTML in an element.

For example:

within 'table' do
  # this works
  find('//tr[2]//td[7]').text.should == "these are the comments" 

  # I want something like this (there is no "html" method)
  find('//tr[2]//td[7]').html.should == "these are the <b>comments</b>" 
end

Anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

You can call HTML DOM innerHTML Property:

find('//tr[2]//td[7]')['innerHTML']

Should work for any browser or driver. You can check all available properties on w3schools

Answer 2

This post is old, but I think I found a way if you still need this.

To access the Nokogiri node from the Capybara element (using Capybara 1.0.0beta1, Nokogiri 1.4.4) try this:

elem = find('//tr[2]//td[10]')
node = elem.native
#This will give you a Nokogiri XML element

node.children[1].attributes["href"].value.should == "these are the <b>comments</b>"

The last part may vary for you, but you should be able to find the HTML somewhere in that node variable

Answer 3

In my environment, find returns a Capybara::Element - that responds to the :native method as Eric Hu mentioned above, which returns a Selenium::WebDriver::Element (for me). Then :text gets the contents, so it could be as simple as:

results = find(:xpath, "//td[@id='#{cell_id}']")
contents = results.native.text

if you're looking for the contents of a table cell. There's no content, inner_html, inner_text, or node methods on a Capybara::Element. Assuming people aren't just making things up, perhaps you get something different back from find depending on what else you have loaded with Capybara.

Answer 4

Looks like you can do (node).native.inner_html to get the HTML content, for example with HTML like this:

<div><strong>Some</strong> HTML</div>

You could do the following:

find('div').native.inner_html
=> '<strong>Some</strong> HTML'

Answer 5

I ran into the same issue as Cyril Duchon-Doris, and per https://github.com/teampoltergeist/poltergeist/issues/629 the way to access the HTML of an Capybara::Poltergeist::Node is via the outerHTML property, e.g.:

find('//tr[2]//td[7]')['outerHTML']