reading text from textarea in webdriver

Question

I am trying to read text from textarea when writing a webdriver test in Java. For some reason I am getting null back when I use .getAttribute():

Answer 1

So finding an element returns a web element. To get the text of the element you have to call getText(), so from above

 WebElement element = wd.findElement(By.id("edit-pi-sample-geo-id"));
 String text = element.getText()

Answer 2

I got this working. Here is the solution-

    WebElement text = wd.findElement(By.id("edit-pi-analytics-tms-id"));
    String textagain = text.getAttribute("value");

I was using the actual value in the textarea in the previous code example i posted which was kinda silly. Thanks guys for your help

Answer 3

I'm using selenium version 3.4 and using element.getAttribute("value") that work for me. The element.getText() would return empty value for TextArea.