How to verify an element contains ANY text?

Question

I often need to wait for an AJAX call to add text to an element on my pages after they finish loading. I understand how to use WebDriverWait to wait for specific text to be present in the element, but I don't see how to wait until there is ANY text present. I'm trying to avoid a while loop that keeps checking the element's text isn't == ''.

Here's what I use to find specific text:

try: WebDriverWait(self.driver, 10).until(EC.text_to_be_present_in_element((By.ID, 'myElem'), 'foo')) except TimeoutException: raise Exception('Unable to find text in this element after waiting 10 seconds')

Is there a way to check for any text or a non-empty string?

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-11 20:04:11Z

15

You can use By.XPATH and check if the text() is non-empty inside the xpath expression:

EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="myElem" and text() != ""]'))

FYI, I'm using presence_of_element_located() here:

An expectation for checking that an element is present on the DOM of a page. This does not necessarily mean that the element is visible.

Complete code:

try: WebDriverWait(self.driver, 10).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="myElem" and text() != ""]'))) except TimeoutException: raise Exception('Unable to find text in this element after waiting 10 seconds')

edited Jul 11, 2014 at 20:04

answered Jul 11, 2014 at 19:41

alecxe

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5 Comments

jjj Over a year ago

Thanks for the reply! I can't seem to get the syntax right for your example. By.xpath has to be By.XPATH I believe, but I still get a TypeError. Also, what is the significance of 'foo' if I don't care what the text contains?

alecxe Over a year ago

@Jesse yeah, xpath was a typo - see the updated answer with a complete code. Check if it works for you. Thanks.

jjj Over a year ago

Ok, just saw your updated answer. It seems like it should work, but it's still timing out for me. Example showing the element has text, and then the WebDriverWait timing out - http://bpaste.net/show/7kl2xNhrrPNTr443YH1M/

alecxe Over a year ago

@Jesse I see, myElem is not a tag name - it is an id attribute value. Correct your xpath: //*[@id="myElem" and text() != ""].

jjj Over a year ago

D'oh, I should've caught that! It works! Interesting how it returns a WebElement object where my original example with text_to_be_present_in_element() returned True.

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