Difference between text and innerHTML using Selenium

Question

Whats the difference between getting text and innerHTML when using selenium. Even though we have text under particular element, when we perform

Answer 1

Chrome (i'm not sure about other browsers) ignores the extra spaces within the HTML code and displays as a single space.

Example  Text
 # notice the two spaces

.get_attribute('innerHTML') will return the double-spaced text, which is what you would see when you inspect element), while .text will return the string with only 1 space.

>>> print(element.get_attribute('innerHTML'))
'Example  Text'
>>> print(element.text)
'Example Text'

This difference is not trivial as the following will result in a NoSuchElementException.

>>> arg = '//div[contains(text(),"Example Text")]'    
>>> driver.find_element_by_xpath(arg)

Similarly, .get_attribute('innerHTML') for the following returns Example Text, while .text returns Example Text.

Example Text