getText() method is used to get the visible text of an element in Selenium. This post will discuss the getText() method of the WebElement interface in detail.
- Method declaration – String getText()
- What does it do? It will get the visible text of an element that is not hidden by the CSS. It also includes the sub-elements of an element.
We have used some keywords like visible text and sub-elements. What do they mean?
Visible Text –
The visible text means the text that is visible on the webpage and not hidden using any CSS property. The getText() method would return an empty string if a text is present for an element but is hidden.
<p>
This is a text
</p>Using getText() on the above element will return the “This is a text” string.
<p style="visibility: hidden;">
This is also a text
</p>Here, getText() would return an empty string because the element is hidden and cannot be seen on the webpage.
Sub Elements –
An HTML page is made up of web elements, and it follows a tree structure with <body> containing all the elements shown on the web page. So, there is a high chance that an element might also contain other web elements. They can also be looked at as nested elements.
<div id = "parent">
This is a parent text
<p id = "child">
This is a child text
</p>
</div>- Using getText() on the parent element would return both “This is a parent text” and “This is a child text” strings.
- Using getText() on the child element will return only “This is a child text”.
Code Example
We will use the getText() method on the below-highlighted element, which should return the highlighted text. You can find the highlighted element on this page.
- We will find the element using the id attribute. Here the id of our element is “firstNamePlaceholder“. So, we will use findElement(By.id(“firstNamePlaceholder”)) to get our element.
- And then, we will use the getText() method on the element.
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
public class CodekruTest {
@Test
public void test() {
// pass the path of the chromedriver location in the second argument
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Users\\MEHUL\\OneDrive\\Desktop\\chromedriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
// opening the url
driver.get("https://testkru.com/Elements/TextFields");
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("firstNamePlaceholder"));
System.out.println(element.getText());
}
}
Output –
1) First Name Without PlaceholderLet’s use the getText() method on an element with several sub-elements. The below image shows one such element.
public class CodekruTest {
@Test
public void test() {
// pass the path of the chromedriver location in the second argument
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Users\\MEHUL\\OneDrive\\Desktop\\chromedriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
// opening the url
driver.get("https://testkru.com/Elements/TextFields");
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("textFieldElements"));
System.out.println(element.getText());
}
}
Output –
1) First Name Without Placeholder
2) Last Name With Placeholder
3) A textarea field
4) An uneditable field
5) A disabled field
6) Duplicated First Name Field (same as #1)
7) Field with hidden visibility
8) Pre-filled Text FieldWe can see that we got the text of all sub-elements as well.
Q – What if there is no text present for an element?
We will get an empty string if no text is present for an element.
Q – What if we use the getText() method on a null WebElement?
We will get a NullPointerException, as illustrated by the below example.
public class CodekruTest {
@Test
public void test() {
// pass the path of the chromedriver location in the second argument
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Users\\MEHUL\\OneDrive\\Desktop\\chromedriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
// opening the url
driver.get("https://testkru.com/Elements/TextFields");
WebElement element = null;
System.out.println(element.getText());
}
}
Output –
java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "org.openqa.selenium.WebElement.getText()" because "element" is nullThis is it. Please visit this link to learn more about WebElement and its methods.
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