getText() method of selenium chrome driver sometimes returns an empty string

Question

I have a curious case where the selenium chrome driver getText() method (java) returns an empty string for some elements, even though it returns a non-empty string for other elements with the same xpath. Here is a bit of the page.

<div __gwt_cell="cell-gwt-uid-223" style="outline-style:none;">

<div>Text_1</div>

<div>Text_2</div>

<div>Text_3</div>

<div>Text_4</div>

<div>Text_5</div>

<div>Text_6</div>

</div>

for each of the inner tags, I can get valid return values for getTagName(), getLocation(), isEnabled(), and isDisplayed(). However, getText() returns an empty string for some of the divs.

Further, I notice that if I use the mac chrome driver, it is consistently the ‘Text_5’ for which getText() returns an empty string. If I use the windows chrome driver, it is, it is consistently the ‘Text_2’ for which getText() returns an empty string. If I use the firefox driver, getText() returns the expected text from all the divs.

Has anyone else had this difficulty?

In my code, I use something like this…

ArrayList<WebElement> list = (ArrayList<WebElement>) driver.findElements(By.xpath(“my xPath here”));

for (WebElement e: list) System.out.println(e.getText());

As suggested below, here is the actual xPath I am using. The page snippet above deals with the last two divs.

//*[@class='gwt-DialogBox']//tr[contains(@class,'data-grid-table-row')]//td[contains(@class,'lms-assignment-selection-wizard-cell')]/div/div

Answer 1

The syntax shown below worked for me when getText() method was returning empty:

element.getAttribute("innerHTML") 

You can use it like this:

for (int count=0;count<=sizeofdd;count++) { String GetInnerHTML=getddvalue.get(count).getAttribute("innerHTML"); }

where getddvalue is the WebElement,

sizeofdd is the size of getddvalue

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