Using Selenium Web Driver to retrieve value of a HTML input

Question

Try element.getAttribute("value")

The text property is for text within the tags of an element. For input elements, the displayed text is not wrapped by the <input> tag, instead it's inside the value attribute.

Note: Case matters. If you specify "Value", you'll get a 'null' value back. This is true for C# at least.

You can do like this :

webelement time=driver.findElement(By.id("input_name")).getAttribute("value");

this will give you the time displaying on the webpage.

With selenium 2,

i usually write it like that :

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("input_name"));
String elementval = element.getAttribute("value");

OR

String elementval = driver.findElement(By.id("input_name")).getAttribute("value");

For python bindings it will be :

element.get_attribute('value')

Following @ragzzy 's answer I use

 public static string Value(this IWebElement element, IJavaScriptExecutor javaScriptExecutor)
    {

        try
        {
            string value = javaScriptExecutor.ExecuteScript("return arguments[0].value", element) as string;
            return value;
        }
        catch (Exception)
        {
            return null;
        }
    }

It works quite well and does not alter the DOM