How do I convert Selenium web element to string?

Question

To find my element, I used:

String text = driver.findelement(By.xpath("xyz"));

But it throws an error of type casting. I tried to use the code below to cast the element to a string:

Driver.gettext(text);

This gave me an error that the cast would not work.

How do I get convert the web element to a string?

Answer 1

Use:

String text = driver.findElement(By.xpath("xyz")).getText();

Answer 2

Are you want to store element as string? Or Element text in String? To store innertText value, you can use

String x = driver.findelements(By.xpath("abc")).getText();

Answer 3

Your cast isn't successful because there isn't really anything to cast into a string from a webelement. You might invoke java.lang.objects toString() method but you'll simply get the hash representation of your object.

If you want to extract the text of the Element e.g. "This is a Text" in the following snippet

<div>
    <span id="text"> This is a Text</span>
</div>

you might use driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div/span[@id='text']")).getText();. In my experience getText does sometimes behave quite unpredictable regarding it's return types (sometimes empty strings, sometimes null) which is a serious problem if you use it in a method like

 public Boolean textMatches(String exp, WebElement elem){
     return elem.getText().equals(exp);
 }

because you'll get an uncaught null pointer if it returns null. So I prefer something along the lines of

 public Boolean textMatches(String exp, WebElement elem){
     String val = (String)((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("return (arguments[0].innerText)?arguments[0].innerText: ''", elem);
     return val.equals(exp);  
  }

since you can be sure that your value will always be a String.

Answer 4

List<WebElement> allElements=driver.findElements(By.xpath("//span[@class='dx-checkbox-icon']"));



// which web element you want or you can loop ALL THE VALUES AND GET

String Text =  allElements.get(1).getText();

System.out.Println(Text);

Answer 5

Automation testers working in software testing companies follow the below approach to convert Selenium web element to string:

First, convert the required web element into list type web element and then fetch list element in a string using for loop.

List<WebElement> links =driver.findElements(By.xpath("xyz"));

String []linkText =new String[links.size()];
int i=0;

//Now store List elements (one or more) text into String array

for(WebElement a: links)
{
   linkText[i]=a.getText();
   i++;
}

Thanks