Get HTML source of WebElement in Selenium WebDriver using Python

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)?

Solution 1:

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

Python:

element.get_attribute('innerHTML')

Java:

elem.getAttribute("innerHTML");

C#:

element.GetAttribute("innerHTML");

Ruby:

element.attribute("innerHTML")

JavaScript:

element.getAttribute('innerHTML');

PHP:

$element->getAttribute('innerHTML');

It was tested and worked with the ChromeDriver.

Solution 2:

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);

Solution 3:

Sure we can get all HTML source code with this script below in Selenium Python:

elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*")
source_code = elem.get_attribute("outerHTML")

If you you want to save it to file:

with open('c:/html_source_code.html', 'w') as f:
    f.write(source_code.encode('utf-8'))

I suggest saving to a file because source code is very very long.

Solution 4:

In Ruby, using selenium-webdriver (2.32.1), there is a page_source method that contains the entire page source.

Solution 5:

Using the attribute method is, in fact, easier and more straightforward.

Using Ruby with the Selenium and PageObject gems, to get the class associated with a certain element, the line would be element.attribute(Class).

The same concept applies if you wanted to get other attributes tied to the element. For example, if I wanted the string of an element, element.attribute(String).