Clear text from textarea with selenium

I've got some tests where I'm checking that the proper error message appears when text in certain fields are invalid. One check for validity is that a certain textarea element is not empty.

If this textarea already has text in it, how can I tell selenium to clear the field?

something like:

driver.get_element_by_id('foo').clear_field()

Solution 1:

driver.find_element_by_id('foo').clear()

Solution 2:

Option a)

If you want to ensure keyboard events are fired, consider using sendKeys(CharSequence).

Example 1:

 from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
 # ...
 webElement.sendKeys(Keys.CONTROL + "a")
 webElement.sendKeys(Keys.DELETE)

Example 2:

 from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
 # ...
 webElement.sendKeys(Keys.BACK_SPACE)  //do repeatedly, e.g. in while loop

WebElement

There are many ways to get the required WebElement, e.g.:

driver.find_element_by_id
driver.find_element_by_xpath
driver.find_element

Option b)

 webElement.clear()

If this element is a text entry element, this will clear the value.

Note that the events fired by this event may not be as you'd expect. In particular, we don't fire any keyboard or mouse events.

Solution 3:

I ran into a field where .clear() did not work. Using a combination of the first two answers worked for this field.

from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

#...your code (I was using python 3)

driver.find_element_by_id('foo').send_keys(Keys.CONTROL + "a")
driver.find_element_by_id('foo').send_keys(Keys.DELETE)