Using Selenium WebDriver to retrieve the value of an HTML input

In the HTML of a web application there is the following code:

<input type="text" name="prettyTime" id="prettyTime" class="ui-state-disabled prettyTime"  readonly="readonly">

A string displaying the time is actually shown on the page.

In Selenium WebDriver, I have a WebElement object referring to the <input> using:

WebElement timeStamp = waitForElement(By.id("prettyTime"));

I want to get the value of the WebElement, or, in other words, what is printed on the page. I tried all the WebElement getters and nothing has been retrieving the actual value that the user sees.

Try element.getAttribute("value")

The text property is for text within the tags of an element. For input elements, the displayed text is not wrapped by the <input> tag, instead it's inside the value attribute.

Note: Case matters. If you specify "Value", you'll get a 'null' value back. This is true for C# at least.

You can do it like this:

webelement time = driver.findElement(By.id("input_name")).getAttribute("value");

This will give you the time displaying on the webpage.

With Selenium 2, I usually write it like this:

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("input_name"));
String elementval = element.getAttribute("value");

Or

String elementval = driver.findElement(By.id("input_name")).getAttribute("value");

For Python bindings it will be:

element.get_attribute('value')

As was mentioned before, you could do something like this:

public String getVal(WebElement webElement) {
    JavascriptExecutor e = (JavascriptExecutor) driver;
    return (String) e.executeScript(String.format("return $('#%s').val();", webElement.getAttribute("id")));
}

But as you can see, your element must have an id attribute, and also, jQuery on your page.

Following ragzzy's answer, I use

public static string Value(this IWebElement element,
                           IJavaScriptExecutor javaScriptExecutor)
{
    try
    {
        string value = javaScriptExecutor.ExecuteScript("return arguments[0].value", element) as string;
        return value;
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {
        return null;
    }
}

It works quite well and does not alter the DOM.

Use

element.GetAttribute("value");

Even though if you don't see the "value" attribute in the HTML DOM, you will get the field value displayed in the GUI.

If the input value gets populated by a script that has some latency involved (e.g. AJAX call) then you need to wait until the input has been populated. E.g.

var w = new WebDriverWait(WebBrowser, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10));
            w.Until((d) => {
                // Wait until the input has a value...

                var elements = d.FindElements(By.Name(name));

                var ele = elements.SingleOrDefault();

                if (ele != null)
                {
                    // Found a single element

                    if (ele.GetAttribute("value") != "")
                    {
                        // We have a value now
                        return true;
                    }
                }

                return false;
                });

        var e = WebBrowser.Current.FindElement(By.Name(name));

        if (e.GetAttribute("value") != value)
        {
            Assert.Fail("Result contains a field named '{0}', but its value is '{1}', not '{2}' as expected", name, e.GetAttribute("value"), value);
        }

Java users:

To get what is printed on the page, we need to use the getText() method.

getText() method

The getText() method returns the visible inner text of a web element.

getAttribute() method

On the other hand, the getAttribute() method fetches the value of the attribute we wish to retrieve.

Example:

<input name="Title" type="text" value="LambdaTest" /> Welcome to LambdaTest </input>

getText()

driver.findElement(By.name("Title")).getText();

Output of above code => Welcome to LambdaTest

getAttribute():

1. driver.findElement(By.name("Title")).getAttribute("value");

   Output of above code => LambdaTest

2. driver.findElement(By.name("Title")).getAttribute("type");

   Output of above code => text

Source: Difference between getText() And getAttribute() in Selenium WebDriver

This is kind of hacky, but it works.

I used JavascriptExecutor and added a div to the HTML, and changed the text in the div to $('#prettyTime').val()

I then used Selenium to retrieve the div and grab its value. After testing the correctness of the value, I removed the div that was just created.