What is the JavaScript equivalent of python's .text?

Question

Element.text returns the text content of an element.

In a different thread on SO, the python script scrapes data from the followers modal on an Instagram account. The following part returns the text inside the lists and stores them in an array.

 xpath = "//div[@style='position: relative; z-index: 1;']//ul/li/div/div/div/div/a"
 followers_elems = driver.find_elements_by_xpath(xpath)
 return [e.text for e in followers_elems]

I'm trying to achieve a similar result in JavaScript (I'm using WebDriverJS) :

 const XPATH = "/html/body/div[3]/div/div[2]/div/div[2]/ul/div/li";
 var followers_elems = await driver.findElements(By.xpath(XPATH));
 var followers_temp = [];
 for (var e in followers_elems) {
  followers_temp.push(e.textContent); }
 console.log(followers_temp);

I'm not sure if textContent is the right property for .text .

I've tried a million different alternatives but all I'm getting is undefined values in the array :

I'm not very proficient with JS yet, but I'm sure e is reading from followers_elems and if I push just e inside the array it can log the total follower numbers just fine. It is getting the text value from xpath that I'm not understanding. Python does this so elegantly but despite the verbose JavaScript is failing me.

Thank you.

Try logging `e` and see which property name contains the text you want. In JS, you can do: `console.log(e);` — code, Jun 29 '18 at 17:26
Thanks Abhishek. The text I want is the textContent from xpath. The usernames of those who follow me. In fact my above code intends to get all the readable texts from each
Yes. I've got the rest of the part running smooth in JS. Would posting the entire script somewhere be more helpful? — Barani, Jun 29 '18 at 18:12
I have posted a function below, if you grab the for-loop part of it it will work. — PJAutomator, Jun 29 '18 at 18:15

PJAutomator · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-29T18:13:40.120

1

WebElement.getText() is the javascript equivalent of getting text element in python when using WebdriverJS.

This should work for you. I have created an async function and easy to understand for loop. Also, since getText() return a promise so i am using async - await to get the text and push it to the followers_temp array.

async function pushTextIn() {
  for (let i = 0; i < followers_elems.length; i++) {
    let text = await followers_elems[i].getText();
    console.log('pushing text: ', text);
    followers_temp.push(text);
  }
  return followers_temp;
}

edited Jun 29 '18 at 18:13

answered Jun 29 '18 at 18:05

PJAutomator

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Sure thing! I tried getText() method earlier and resolved the promise with .then(). But I was getting typeerrors that getText is not a function. – Barani Jun 29 '18 at 18:39

What is the JavaScript equivalent of python's .text?

1 Answers1