How to get text of an element in Selenium?

Learn how to retrieve the text of an element using Selenium in this concise guide. Discover essential techniques to efficiently extract data, ensuring accuracy and effectiveness in your scraping tasks.

Best practices

Ensure that the web page is fully loaded before attempting to retrieve text to avoid `NoSuchElementException`.
Use explicit waits to handle elements that might take longer to appear due to dynamic content loading.
Always validate the correctness of the locator (ID, class name, XPath) to ensure it uniquely identifies the target element.
Keep your Selenium drivers updated to ensure compatibility with the latest versions of web browsers.

# Importing necessary libraries
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

# Setting up the WebDriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

# Opening the target webpage
driver.get("https://sandbox.oxylabs.io/products")

# Example 1: Get text using element ID
element_text_by_id = driver.find_element(By.ID, "element-id").text
print(element_text_by_id)

# Example 2: Get text using element class name
element_text_by_class = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "element-class").text
print(element_text_by_class)

# Example 3: Get text using XPath
element_text_by_xpath = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//tagname[@attribute='value']").text
print(element_text_by_xpath)

# Closing the driver
driver.quit()

Common issues

Ensure that the element is visible on the page before attempting to retrieve its text, as hidden elements might return an empty string.
Check for iframes and switch to the appropriate iframe context if the element is within one, as Selenium does not automatically manage iframe switches.
Handle potential `StaleElementReferenceException` by re-locating the element or using a retry mechanism in your script.
Consider using `get_attribute('textContent')` instead of `.text` if you need to retrieve text that includes child element texts.

# Incorrect: Trying to get text from a hidden element
hidden_text = driver.find_element(By.ID, "hidden-element").text

# Correct: Check if element is visible before getting text
element = driver.find_element(By.ID, "visible-element")
if element.is_displayed():
visible_text = element.text

# Incorrect: Ignoring iframe and trying to access element directly
text_inside_iframe = driver.find_element(By.ID, "iframe-element").text

# Correct: Switch to the iframe first then access the element
driver.switch_to.frame("iframe-name")
text_inside_iframe = driver.find_element(By.ID, "iframe-element").text
driver.switch_to.default_content()

# Incorrect: Directly accessing an element that might be stale
stale_text = driver.find_element(By.ID, "dynamic-element").text

# Correct: Use a try-except block to handle StaleElementReferenceException
try:
dynamic_text = driver.find_element(By.ID, "dynamic-element").text
except StaleElementReferenceException:
dynamic_text = driver.find_element(By.ID, "dynamic-element").text

# Incorrect: Using .text on an element with nested child texts
parent_text = driver.find_element(By.ID, "parent-element").text

# Correct: Use get_attribute('textContent') to include child element texts
complete_text = driver.find_element(By.ID, "parent-element").get_attribute('textContent')