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How do I get text in Selenium when the text isn't neatly enclosed within a tag?

July 9, 2024

<td data-title="Docket No.">"3228"
    <div class="cursor-pointer expand-collapse-container expand-document-name">
        <div class="expand-arrow" aria-hidden="true"></div>
        <div class="collapse-arrow" aria-hidden="true"></div>
    </div>
</td>

I am using Selenium and want to get the text that follows

<td data-title="Docket No.">

which in this case is "3228"

I tried:

lastdocket=element.find_element(By.XPATH,'//*[@data-title="Docket No."]/text()').get_attribute('innerHTML')

program crashes and I get:

 Message: invalid selector
from javascript error: {"status":32,"value":"The result of the xpath expression \"//*[@data-title=\"Docket No.\"]/text()\" is: [object Text]. It should be an element."}

I then tried getting rid of ‘text()’ from xpath expression:

lastdocket=element.find_element(By.XPATH,'//*[@data-title="Docket No."]/').get_attribute('innerHTML')

And get this when I print ‘lastdocket’:

'3228<div class="cursor-pointer expand-collapse-container expand-document-name"><div class="expand-arrow" aria-hidden="true"></div><div class="collapse-arrow" aria-hidden="true"></div></div>'

I realize I could remove thta tags the follow ‘3228’, but is there a way to return just the number???

>Solution :

The find_element method can only ever return an element, never a text node (so any XPath ending in /text() will fail).

But once you’ve found your element you can access its text property, which will return the text "as rendered", which NB is not necessarily exactly the same thing as what the XPath string() function would return; a concatenation of the text() node descendants of the element.

https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/elements/information/#text-content