Why does getText() return an empty string while getAttribute("value") retrieves the expected text value in Selenium using Java?

General Discussions
#1

I encountered an issue while attempting to retrieve text from an element using Selenium gettext() method in Java. I initially tried to use getText() with By.id and By.cssSelector, but it returned an empty string. I used getAttribute(“value”) to work around this, which provided the expected text value.

Here’s the Java code snippet:

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
Boolean elementIsPresent = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.textToBePresentInElementValue(By.cssSelector("#general_service_name"), "[reg] general_service_name")); // true

// Using By.id to locate the element
WebElement general_service_name = driver.findElement(By.id("general_service_name"));

// Checking if the element is displayed
Boolean isDisplayed;
if (general_service_name.isDisplayed())
    isDisplayed = true;
else
    isDisplayed = false; // true

// Trying to get text using getText() and getAttribute("value")
String text_empty = general_service_name.getText(); // ""
String text_with_value = driver.findElement(By.id("general_service_name")).getAttribute("value"); // "[reg] general_service_name"

While getAttribute(“value”) successfully retrieves the text value, getText() returned an empty string. I’m curious why getText() behaves this way and if there are situations where getText() might be more appropriate than getAttribute(“value”). Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

#2

In Selenium, getText() retrieves the innerText of a WebElement.

For your input field, which lacks any inner text, the text content resides within the value attribute. Therefore, accessing it via getAttribute(“value”) is the appropriate method in this case.

#3

In Java, using ele.getAttribute("innerHTML") allows you to retrieve text that might be present in the background but not yet displayed on the page.

This approach was particularly useful in scenarios where getText() returned an empty string, but getAttribute("innerHTML") successfully fetched the inner text of elements like <svg><title>.

#4

You can extract the value of the value attribute, which is [reg] title, from the <input> element with id="general_service_name" and name="general_service_name" using a CSS selector:

System.out.println(driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input#general_service_name[name='general_service_name']")).getAttribute("value"));

Using getAttribute(“value”) with XPath:

Similarly, you can achieve the same using XPath:

System.out.println(driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@id='general_service_name' and @name='general_service_name']")).getAttribute("value"));

Using WebDriverWait with CSS Selector and getAttribute(“value”):

To ensure the element is visible before retrieving its attribute value using CSS Selector:

WebElement element = new WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.cssSelector("input#general_service_name[name='general_service_name']")));
System.out.println(element.getAttribute("value"));

Using WebDriverWait with XPath and getAttribute(“value”):

WebElement element = new WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath("//input[@id='general_service_name' and @name='general_service_name']")));
System.out.println(element.getAttribute("value"));

These approaches ensure that you fetch the [reg] title value from the <input> element reliably based on its attribute, handling visibility wait conditions as needed.