What is the difference between getText() and getAttribute() in Selenium WebDriver?

Question

Both are used to get the WebElement value in between tags.

Is my assumption right? If wrong, please elaborate.

Answer 1

  <input attr1='a' attr2='b' attr3='c'>foo</input>

getAttribute(attr1) you get 'a'

getAttribute(attr2) you get 'b'

getAttribute(attr3) you get 'c'

getText() with no parameter you can only get 'foo'

Answer 2

getAttribute() -> It fetches the text that contains one of any attribute in the HTML tag. Suppose there is an HTML tag like

<input name="Name Locator" value="selenium">Hello</input>

Now getAttribute() fetches the data of the attribute of 'value', which is "Selenium".

Returns:

The attribute's current value or null if the value is not set.

driver.findElement(By.name("Name Locator")).getAttribute("value")  //

The field value is retrieved by the getAttribute("value") Selenium WebDriver predefined method and assigned to the String object.

getText() -> delivers the innerText of a WebElement. Get the visible (i.e. not hidden by CSS) innerText of this element, including sub-elements, without any leading or trailing whitespace.

Returns:

The innerText of this element.

driver.findElement(By.name("Name Locator")).getText();

'Hello' will appear

Answer 3

<img src="w3schools.jpg" alt="W3Schools.com" width="104" height="142">

In above html tag we have different attributes like src, alt, width and height.

If you want to get the any attribute value from above html tag you have to pass attribute value in getAttribute() method

Syntax:

getAttribute(attributeValue)
getAttribute(src) you get w3schools.jpg
getAttribute(height) you get 142
getAttribute(width) you get 104