Selenium cannot extract text

Question

I am trying to extract some text from this page

In particular I want to extract the text between the tags. I am using Selenium and the following code but even though the object is recognized, the text is an empty string. Below is the code I am using:

testo = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/span/pre[1]').text

What do think think it could be the issue?

Answer 1

The text within <pre> tag is within an <iframe>

So to extract the desired text you have to:

• Induce WebDriverWait for the desired frame to be available and switch to it.

• Induce WebDriverWait for the desired element to be clickable.

• You can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

  • Using CSS_SELECTOR:

    WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.frame_to_be_available_and_switch_to_it((By.CSS_SELECTOR,"iframe#mainFrame")))
    print(WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "span.dettaglio_atto_testo"))).get_attribute("innerHTML"))
    

  • Using XPATH:

    WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.frame_to_be_available_and_switch_to_it((By.XPATH,"//iframe[@id='mainFrame']")))
    print(WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//span[@class='dettaglio_atto_testo']/pre"))).text)
    

• Note : You have to add the following imports :

   from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
   from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
   from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
  

Answer 2

Firstly, you should switch to iframe. And then you can use .getText() method.

If it doesn't work you can try this: .getAttribute("innerText")