How to get text of an element in Selenium WebDriver, without including child element text?

Question

<div id="a">This is some

   <div id="b">text</div>

</div>

Getting "This is some" is non-trivial. For instance, this returns "This is some text":

driver.find_element_by_id('a').text

How does one, in a general way, get the text of a specific element without including the text of it's children?

(I'm providing an answer below but will leave the question open in case someone can come up with a less hideous solution).

Answer 1

Here's a general solution:

def get_text_excluding_children(driver, element):

    return driver.execute_script("""

    return jQuery(arguments[0]).contents().filter(function() {

        return this.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE;

    }).text();

    """, element)

The element passed to the function can be obtained from the find_element...() methods (i.e. it can be a WebElement object).

Or if you don't have jQuery or don't want to use it you can replace the body of the function above with this:

 

return self.driver.execute_script("""

var parent = arguments[0];

var child = parent.firstChild;

var ret = "";

while(child) {

    if (child.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE)

        ret += child.textContent;

    child = child.nextSibling;

}

return ret;

""", element) 

I'm actually using this code in a test suite.