Find Text without span Text - Python - Selenium

Question

I want to get text that is stored on an element. Text is not a property instead when I expand Element (in chrome's inspection [DevTools]) it has two sub-properties, span and text. it looks something like this: Web Layout I want to find only the text property not span.

I've used several way like:

elem = driver.find_element_by_xpath("/HTML/Body/li/a")
text = elem.text

But this returns:

size
8

Copying the xpath for the property, copies "html\body\li\a.text()" and finding this by xpath method throws error, obviously.

To the point: I just want to get text child property of element not span. But it returns both. Any help will be appreciated...

• PDHide: Added a third approach also using document.evaluate

Answer 1

Span inside is usually used for styling so, getText Assumes all child elements are part of the actual text.

Couldn't find a direct way to achieve what you are trying to do,

The workaround is to :

First solution:

just get the text from both and replace the unwanted part

 parent= driver.find_elements_by_tag_name('a')
 child= driver.find_elements_by_tag_name('span')
 parentText= parent.text
 childText= child.text
 parentText=parentText.replace(childText, "")

Else:

Second solution

parent= driver.find_elements_by_tag_name('a')
parentText= driver.execute_script("return arguments[0].firstChild.textContent", parent) 

parentText will have the value that you need

Third approach :

the script document.evaluate inside selenium execute script:

text= driver.execute_script("return document.evaluate('//a/text()', document, null, XPathResult.STRING_TYPE, null ).stringValue;");

text will have the required value