README.md

Selenium Text Finding Utilities

Make your tests user-first by using these utilities to test against the presented content on the page, not the implementation detail of specific markup.

Find Elements by Text

The most powerful utilities are find_element_by_text(driver, text) and find_elements_by_text(driver, text), which search the page for one or multiple elements with content matching the given text, as efficiently as possible. By default, the inner text must match exactly.

Call with the flag exact=False to find elements which simply contain the text.

For example::

    # Find the logout element and click it, whatever it might be
    findtext.find_element_by_text(driver, 'Logout').click()

Form Helpers

You can locate and interact with form elements based on their labels, the way a user would find things on the page and the way your features are most likely to be documented.

fill_input_by_label(driver, element, label, value, timeout=None):

Interact with text fields on the page based on their visible label. Here is how you might fill in a login form:

    fill_input_by_label(driver, None, "Username", username)
    fill_input_by_label(driver, None, "Password", username)

Notice how you don't need to know anything about the markup on the page, the ID of the input elements, or if the label text is "Username" or "Username:".

If you only want to look at a part of the page, not the whole page, you can pass an optional element as the second parameter. The search will be done to descendents under that element.

fill_input_by_placeholder(driver, element, label, value):

You might also know youb can locate an element based on the placeholder text that can be read in the input. This function is called just like the previous function.

read_input_by_label(driver, element, label):

You can use the same logic to read information back out of forms, too.

    assert expected == read_input_by_label(driver, None, "State")