What are the differences between getText and getAttribute functions in Selenium WebDriver

Question

I know that both are used to get the WebElement value in between tags? Can someone please tell me what exactly is the difference, and what extra can getAttribute() retrieve (well, that's my assumption)?

Answer 1

See, both are used to retrieve something from the webelement.
getText() simply retrieves the visible text present in the webelement. So, this is the text inbetween 2 HTML tags (openning & closing tags)
getAttribute() however, retrieves the value of attribute(s) of that webelement. So, this is the key & value pairs inside the tags(mostly openning tags).

Look at the below example to understand this better.

<input attra='1' attrb='2' attrc='3'>Edureka</input>

getAttribute(attra) --> you get value '1' returned
getAttribute(attr2) --> you get value '2' returned
getAttribute(attr3) --> you get value '3' returned

getText() --> with no parameter returns only 'Edureka'.

Comments

getText() is a method which gets us the visible (i.e. not hidden by CSS) innerText of this element, including sub-elements, without any leading or trailing white space.

The getAttribute() method is declared in the WebElement interface, and it returns the value of the web element’s attribute as a string. It fetches the value of an attribute, in HTML code whatever is present in the left side of '=' is an attribute, value on the right side is an attribute value.