Get HTML source of WebElement in Selenium WebDriver using Python

Asked 2011-08-31T21:44:11.100

682

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

from selenium import webdriver
wd = webdriver.Firefox()

I know I can grab a webelement 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 a way to get the "element source"?

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

The Selenium WebDriver documentation for Python are basically non-existent and I don't see anything in the code that seems to enable that functionality.

What is the best way to access the HTML of an element (and its children)?

Edit Report

2 Answers

104

There is not really a straightforward way of getting the HTML source code of a webelement. You will have to use JavaScript. I am not too sure about python bindings, but you can easily do like this in Java. I am sure there must be something similar to JavascriptExecutor class in Python.

 WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("foo"));
 String contents = (String)((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("return arguments[0].innerHTML;", element);

answered 2011-09-03T03:29:14.387

If you are interested in a solution for Selenium Remote Control in Python, here is how to get innerHTML:

innerHTML = sel.get_eval("window.document.getElementById('prodid').innerHTML")

answered 2013-07-09T14:18:56.623

Get HTML source of WebElement in Selenium WebDriver using Python

2 Answers

Your Answer