Selenium WebDriver getText

Question

I have a

0

.

I try to write a test that myDiv has 0 text in it. With WebDriver it is:

<

Answer 1

I had the same problem; a little digging brought me to this:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/webdriver/fRb_1QOr3wg/wzUsW3Ll6bgJ

HTMLUnitDriver (and apparently FirefoxDriver) will return empty strings when you try to call WebElement#getText() on elements whose CSS property 'display' is set to 'none'.

Here is my solution:

public void assertContainsText(final By by, final String value) { 
    browser.waitTillElementPresent(by);
        Boolean result = new WebDriverWait(getWebDriver(),Browser.DEFAULT_WAIT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS).until(new ExpectedCondition() {
            @Override
            public Boolean apply(WebDriver arg0) {
                WebElement elem = arg0.findElement(by);
                String text = "";
                if (elem.isDisplayed()) {
                    text = elem.getText();
                } else {
                  //have to use JavaScript because HtmlUnit will return empty string for a hidden element's text
                    text = (String) executeScript("return arguments[0].innerHTML", elem);
                    text = text.replace("

", "\n"); //scary
                }
                return text.contains(value);
            }
        });
        Assert.assertTrue(by.toString() + " contains value ["+value+"]", result);
}

Yes, it's ugly as sin. And note the text.replace("

") - this is because HTML tags aren't escaped when you pull out the raw data. The WebDriver will nicely 'unescape' this if you call #getText() on the element.

I've now put in a request to our IT guys to install X-Windows on our CI servers so we can run the FirefoxDriver. We've had nothing but trouble from the HTMLUnitDriver, and it's incredibly slow to boot.