[java] Using Selenium Web Driver to retrieve value of a HTML input

In the HTML of a webapp there is the following code

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

What is actually shown on the page is a string displaying the time.

In Selenium Web Driver, 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. Any help? Thanks.

You can do like this :

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

this will give you the time displaying on the webpage.

element.GetAttribute("value");

Eventhough if you don't see the "value" attribute in html dom, you will get the field value displayed on the GUI.

With selenium 2,

i usually write it like that :

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

OR

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

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.

For python bindings it will be :

element.get_attribute('value')

As was mentioned before, you could do something like that

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

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);
        }