Selenium: Extract Text of a div with cssSelector in Java

Question

I am writing a JUnit test for a webpage, using Selenium, and I am trying to verify that the expected text exists within a page. The code of the webpage I am testing looks like this:

<div id="recipient_div_3" class="label_spacer">
   <label class="nodisplay" for="Recipient_nickname"> recipient field: reqd info </label>
   <span id="Recipient_nickname_div_2" class="required-field"> *</span>
   Recipient:
</div>

I want to compare what is expected with what is on the page, so I want to use Assert.assertTrue(). I know that to get everything from the div, I can do

String element = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("div[id='recipient_div_3']")).getText().replaceAll("\n", " ");

but this will return "reqd info * Recipient:"

Is there any way to just get the text from the div ("Recipient") using cssSelector, without the other tags?

Ross Patterson · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-27 16:58:49Z

5

You can't do this with a CSS selector, because CSS selectors don't have a fine-grained enough approach to express "the text node contained in the DIV but not its other contents". You can do that with an XPath locator, though:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[@id='recipient_div_3']/text()")).getText()

That XPath expression will identify just the single text node that is a direct child of the DIV, rather than all the text contained within it and its child nodes.

answered Apr 27, 2012 at 16:58

Ross Patterson

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3 Comments

BSchlinker Over a year ago

The XPath locator provided is logical and works in Chrome's console, but it won't work in Selenium. Selenium will throw the following error...

The given selector //div[@class='StdLevel1']/text() is either invalid or does not result in a WebElement. The following error occurred: InvalidSelectorError: The result of the xpath expression "//div[@class='StdLevel1']/text()" is: [object Text]. It should be an element.

Brantley Blanchard Over a year ago

So is there a solution or would you just grab the div and parse the getText() string?

Learner Over a year ago

To my understanding, Infact selenium does to allow text(), node etc.function.

Aleh Douhi · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-27 20:15:35Z

4

I am not sure if it is possible with one css locator, but you can get text from div, then get text from div's child nodes and subtract them. Something like that (code wasn't checked):

String temp = "";
List<WebElement> tempElements = driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("div[id='recipient_div_3'] *"));
for (WebElement tempElement : tempElements) {
    temp =+ " " + tempElement.getText();
}
String element = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("div[id='recipient_div_3']")).getText().replaceAll("\n", " ").replace(temp, "");

This is for case when you try to avoid using xpath. Xpath allows to do it:

//div[@id='recipient_div_3']/text()

edited Apr 27, 2012 at 20:15

answered Apr 27, 2012 at 16:34

Aleh Douhi

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Comments

dbow · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-12 12:54:30Z

0

You could also get the text content of an element and remove the tags with regexp. Also notice: you should use the reluctant quntifier https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/quant.html

String getTextContentWithoutTags(WebElement element) {
    return element.getText().replaceAll("<[^>]*?/>", "").trim();
}

edited May 12, 2016 at 12:54

answered May 12, 2016 at 12:47

dbow

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