how to convert WebElement to string in selenium using java?

Question

I am not able to convert webelement to string values.

 List<WebElement> a=driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[@id='content']/table/tbody/tr/td[2]"));

i want convert above List<WebElement> to String.

• Peter M. - stands for Monica: What are you trying to accomplish? It does not make sense to convert object to a string. What you probably want is to access some of the attributes of the object which are strings, like text and/or value.
• Sushant: Actually i want to getText from webelement and write that text into excel. That's why want to convert webelement into string so that i will able to write into excel.
• Peter M. - stands for Monica: Exactly. So you DON'T want to convert element to string but elem.getText() of it.
• Sushant: Yeah. But how to do that?

Answer 1

You can do something like the following:

List<WebElement> links =driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[@id='content']/table/tbody/tr/td[2]"));
String []linkText =new String[links.size()];
int i=0;
//Storing List elements text into String array
for(WebElement a: links)
{
 linkText[i]=a.getText();
 i++;
}

Answer 2

Here's another way you can do it using java 8 features:

By byXpath = By.xpath("//*[@id='content']/table/tbody/tr/td[2]");
List<WebElement> links = driver.findElements(byXpath);
List<String> texts = links.stream().map(WebElement::getText).collect(Collectors.toList());

This will iterate through each WebElement, call getText, and collect all the returned values into a brand new list.

Answer 3

 @FindBys({
 @FindBy(xpath = "//div[@class=\"error-text text--center margin--bottom_10\"]")
})
private List<WebElement> errorTexts;
 private List<String> getAllErrorsText() {
 return errorTexts.stream()
 .map(WebElement::getText)
 .collect(Collectors.toList());
}