How to pull content of a div into a String

Question

I am looking for a way to pull the html or text content of a so I could work with it for a method which validates links amongst text of messages displays on a webpage. I am using selenium and java.

<div>
    "This link"
    <a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>
    "exists." 
</div>

I have been researching ways to pull the html of the link from a single message and most of what I have encountered allows you to pull the text of the 'href' attribute or the link text. It may not be possible. Preferably, I would like to pull all the content from the div.

I have tried something similar to this below but it returns 'http://www.google.com'.

WebElement e = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
String content = e.getAttribute("innerHTML");  

I have also tried using xpaths using contains() and text(). Both return the text of link but not anything else.

Any ideas what I could try?

Answer 1

Try using this:

WebElement e = driver.findElements(By.xPath("//a/.."));

It will select the parent element, the div in this case, of every a. If you want to add a predicate (that is, a condition) for which to filter, you can do this:

WebElement e = driver.findElements(By.xPath("//a[contains(@href, 'http:')]/.."));

I chose // as start, which searches the whole document. If you want to search only a part, change that to an XPath expression that only selects that part.