How can I print the HTML source of a WebElement in Selenium WebDriver using Python?

General Discussions
#1

How can I print the HTML source of a WebElement in Selenium WebDriver using Python?

I’m using the Python bindings to run Selenium WebDriver:

from selenium import webdriver
wd = webdriver.Firefox()

I know I can grab a webelement like so:

elem = wd.find_element_by_css_selector('#my-id')

And I know I can get the full page source with…

wd.page_source

But is there a way to get the “element source”?

elem.source # ← returns the HTML as a string

The Selenium WebDriver documentation for Python is basically non-existent, and I don’t see anything in the code that seems to enable that functionality.

What is the best way to access the HTML of an element (and its children)?

#2

You can read the innerHTML attribute to get the source of the content of the element or outerHTML for the source with the current element.

Python:

element.get_attribute(‘innerHTML’) Java:

elem.getAttribute(“innerHTML”); C#:

element.GetAttribute(“innerHTML”); Ruby:

element.attribute(“innerHTML”) JavaScript:

element.getAttribute(‘innerHTML’);

PHP:

$element->getAttribute(‘innerHTML’);

It was tested and worked with the ChromeDriver.

#3

Another approach is to use execute_script to run JavaScript code that extracts the inner HTML of the element.

from selenium import webdriver

wd = webdriver.Firefox()
wd.get('https://www.example.com')
elem = wd.find_element_by_css_selector('#my-id')
elem_html = wd.execute_script('return arguments[0].innerHTML;', elem)
print(elem_html)
wd.quit()
#4

You can use the get_attribute(‘outerHTML’) method to get the outer HTML of a WebElement, including the element itself and its children.

from selenium import webdriver

wd = webdriver.Firefox()
wd.get('https://www.example.com')
elem = wd.find_element_by_css_selector('#my-id')
elem_html = elem.get_attribute('outerHTML')
print(elem_html)
wd.quit()