How to Retrieve Text from a Selenium Element Excluding Its Sub-elements

How can I use Selenium to get the text from an element while excluding its sub-elements?

from selenium import webdriver

# Initialize the webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
# Open the desired web page
driver.get('http://example.com')

# Locate the parent element
parent_element = driver.find_element_by_id('parent')

# Get only the text of the parent element, excluding sub-elements
parent_text = parent_element.get_attribute('innerText')

# Print the text
print(parent_text)

# Close the driver
driver.quit()

When using Selenium to scrape data from a web page, it’s often necessary to retrieve text from a parent element without including the text from its child elements. This can be done using certain attributes and methods provided by Selenium.

# Example of getting text without sub-elements
parent_text = parent_element.get_attribute('innerText')

Causes

• Misunderstanding how different text attributes work in Selenium.
• Confusion between innerText and outerText usage.
• Using child elements' text instead of the parent element.

Solutions

• Use the `get_attribute('innerText')` method to get the visible text of the parent without child elements.
• Alternatively, locate the sub-elements and avoid their text during extraction.

Mistake: Using `text` property directly instead of `get_attribute('innerText')`.

Solution: Always access the text using `get_attribute('innerText')` to exclude child elements.

Mistake: Assuming `outerText` will only return parent text.

Solution: `outerText` may yield different results based on browser implementation; prefer `innerText` for this task.