Reading text using selenium webdriver XPath

Question

I'm using selenium to get some text on my webpage using XPath.

<span id="data" class="firefinder-match">
    Seat Height, Laden
  <sup>
     <a class="speckeyfootnote" rel="p7" href="#">7</a>
  </sup>
</span>

If I use the following code -

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[@id='data']")).getText();

I get the result = Seat Height, Laden 7

But I want to avoid reading the text within the <sup> tags and get the result Seat Height, Laden

Please let me know which XPath expression I can use to get my desired result.

Answer 1

I don't know about how to do this in Selenium, so there's my JS solution. The idea is to get all children of the element (including the text nodes) and then select only the text nodes. You might need to add some .trim() (or JS equivalent) calls to get rid of unneeded spaces.

The complete code:

WebElement elem = driver.findElement(By.id("data"));
String text;
if (driver instanceof JavascriptExecutor) {
    text = ((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript(
            "var nodes = arguments[0].childNodes;" +
            "var text = '';" +
            "for (var i = 0; i < nodes.length; i++) {" +
            "    if (nodes[i].nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE) {" +
            "        text += nodes[i].textContent;" +
            "    }" +
            "}" +
            "return text;"
            , elem);
}