How to get text of an element in Selenium WebDriver, without including child element text?

Question

<div id="a">This is some    <div id="b">text</div> </div> 

Getting "This is some" is non-trivial. For instance, this returns "This is some text":

driver.find_element_by_id('a').text 

How does one, in a general way, get the text of a specific element without including the text of it's children?

(I'm providing an answer below but will leave the question open in case someone can come up with a less hideous solution).

Answer 1

Here's a general solution:

def get_text_excluding_children(driver, element):     return driver.execute_script("""     return jQuery(arguments[0]).contents().filter(function() {         return this.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE;     }).text();     """, element) 

The element passed to the function can be something obtained from the find_element...() methods (i.e. it can be a WebElement object).

Or if you don't have jQuery or don't want to use it you can replace the body of the function above above with this:

return self.driver.execute_script(""" var parent = arguments[0]; var child = parent.firstChild; var ret = ""; while(child) {     if (child.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE)         ret += child.textContent;     child = child.nextSibling; } return ret; """, element)  

I'm actually using this code in a test suite.

Answer 2

In the HTML which you have shared:

<div id="a">This is some    <div id="b">text</div> </div> 

The text This is some is within a text node. To depict the text node in a structured way:

<div id="a">     This is some    <div id="b">text</div> </div> 

---

This Usecase

To extract and print the text This is some from the text node using Selenium's python client you have 2 ways as follows:

• Using splitlines(): You can identify the parent element i.e. <div id="a">, extract the innerHTML and then use splitlines() as follows:

  • using xpath:

    print(driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@id='a']").get_attribute("innerHTML").splitlines()[0]) 

  • using xpath:

    print(driver.find_element_by_css_selector("div#a").get_attribute("innerHTML").splitlines()[0]) 

• Using execute_script(): You can also use the execute_script() method which can synchronously execute JavaScript in the current window/frame as follows:

  • using xpath and firstChild:

    parent_element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@id='a']") print(driver.execute_script('return arguments[0].firstChild.textContent;', parent_element).strip()) 

  • using xpath and childNodes[n]:

    parent_element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@id='a']") print(driver.execute_script('return arguments[0].childNodes[1].textContent;', parent_element).strip())