[python] How can I get the current contents of an element in webdriver

I must be thinking about this wrong.

I want to get the contents of an element, in this case a formfield, on a page that I am accessing with Webdriver/Selenium 2

Here is my broken code:

 Element=driver.find_element_by_id(ElementID)
 print Element
 print Element.text

here is the result:

<selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement object at 0x9c2392c>

(Notice the blank line) I know that element has contents since I just stuffed them in there with the previous command using .sendkeys and I can see them on the actual web page while the script runs.

but I need to get the contents back into data.

What can I do to read this? Preferably in a generic fashion so that I can pull contents from varied types of elements.

My answer is based on this answer: How can I get the current contents of an element in webdriver just more like copy-paste.

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('http://www.w3c.org')
element = driver.find_element_by_name('q')
element.send_keys('hi mom')

element_text = element.text
element_attribute_value = element.get_attribute('value')

print (element)
print ('element.text: {0}'.format(element_text))
print ('element.get_attribute(\'value\'): {0}'.format(element_attribute_value))


element = driver.find_element_by_css_selector('.description.expand_description > p')
element_text = element.text
element_attribute_value = element.get_attribute('value')

print (element)
print ('element.text: {0}'.format(element_text))
print ('element.get_attribute(\'value\'): {0}'.format(element_attribute_value))
driver.quit()

In Java its Webelement.getText() . Not sure about python.

I know when you said "contents" you didn't mean this, but if you want to find all the values of all the attributes of a webelement this is a pretty nifty way to do that with javascript in python:

everything = b.execute_script(
    'var element = arguments[0];'
    'var attributes = {};'
    'for (index = 0; index < element.attributes.length; ++index) {'
    '    attributes[element.attributes[index].name] = element.attributes[index].value };'
    'var properties = [];'
    'properties[0] = attributes;'
    'var element_text = element.textContent;'
    'properties[1] = element_text;'
    'var styles = getComputedStyle(element);'
    'var computed_styles = {};'
    'for (index = 0; index < styles.length; ++index) {'
    '    var value_ = styles.getPropertyValue(styles[index]);'
    '    computed_styles[styles[index]] = value_ };'
    'properties[2] = computed_styles;'
    'return properties;', element)

you can also get some extra data with element.__dict__.

I think this is about all the data you'd ever want to get from a webelement.

element.get_attribute('innerHTML')