Python Selenium: Finds h1 element but returns empty text string

Question

I am trying to get the text in the header on this page:

iShares FTSE MIB UCITS ETF EUR (Dist)

The tag looks like this:

<h1 class="product-title" title="iShares FTSE MIB UCITS ETF EUR (Dist)"> iShares FTSE MIB UCITS ETF EUR (Dist) </h1>

I am using this xPath:

xp_name = ".//*[@class[contains(normalize-space(.), 'product-title')]]"

Retrieving via .text in Selenium WebDriver for Python:

new_name = driver.find_element_by_xpath(xp_name).text

The driver finds the xpath, but when I print new_name, macOS Terminal only prints a blank string: ""

What could be the reason for this?

Note: I also tried some other xpath alternatives, getting the same result, for example with:

xp_name = ".//*[@id='fundHeader']//h1"

Andersson · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-16 09:39:03Z

52

The problem is that there are two h1 elements with totally the same outer HTML: the first is hidden, the second is not. You can check it with

print(len(driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//h1[@class="product-title "]')))

text property allow you to get text from only visible elements while textContent attribute also allow to get text of hidden one

Try to replace

new_name = driver.find_element_by_xpath(xp_name).text

with

new_name = driver.find_element_by_xpath(xp_name).get_attribute('textContent')

or simply handle the second (visible) header:

driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//h1[@class="product-title "]')[1].text

edited Apr 16, 2017 at 9:39

answered Apr 15, 2017 at 19:02

Andersson

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2 Comments

Ahmad Moussa Over a year ago

Might or might not be relevant: For me the problem was that the element I was trying to fetch just wasn't loaded yet. So a 'time.sleep(1)' fixed it for me. The way the website was setup, it wouldn't throw an error tho.

Antonych Over a year ago

Just want to say Thank You for this answer. Spent couple of hours trying to figure out why i get " " in scraping results, only after i added .get_attribute('textContent') i got my desired output

Joel Mata · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-24 21:13:08Z

1

As @ahmad-moussa mentioned, for me to the solution was:

import time

(...)

time.sleep(1)
# before 
<webelement>.text

answered Jan 24, 2021 at 21:13

Joel Mata

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