Get HTML Source of WebElement in Selenium WebDriver using Python

Question

I'm using the Python bindings to run Selenium WebDriver.

from selenium import webdriver

wd = webdriver.Firefox()

 I know I can grab a web element like so...

elem = wd.find_element_by_css_selector('#my-id')

And I know I can get the full page source with...

wd.page_source

 But is there any way to get the "element source"?

elem.source   # <-- returns the HTML as a string

The selenium web driver docs for Python are basically non-existent and I don't see anything in the code that seems to enable that functionality.

Any thoughts on the best way to access the HTML of an element (and its children)?

 

Answer 1

You can read the innerHTML attribute to get a source of the content of the element or outerHTML for source with the current element.

Python:

element.get_attribute('innerHTML')

Java:

 elem.getAttribute("innerHTML");

 C#:

element.GetAttribute("innerHTML");

 Ruby:

element.attribute("innerHTML")

 JS:

element.getAttribute('innerHTML');

 PHP:

$elem.getAttribute('innerHTML');

Tested and works with the ChromeDriver.

Hope this helps!

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