Python Selenium: Find object attributes using xpath

Question

I am new to xpath, trying to get value of the "value" using xpath:

<input type="submit" value="  Search  " class="long searchButton" style="width:190px !important;">

while it is easy to find element by "type="submit" like:

browser.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[@type='submit']")

I haven't been able to figure out how to get the values I need, as:

browser.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[@type='submit']/@value")

somewhat expectedly gives an error:

expression "//*[@type=\'submit\']/@value" is: [object Attr]. It should be an element

Any ideas how to solve this?

EDIT: The xpath is correct, but it "returns" an obj attribute and as it is not an element, it is not allowed. I can't find a method like get_attr_by_xpath(), or anything similar.

Solution 1

I finally used get_attribute("value") as:

for i in browser.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[@type='submit']"):
    print i.get_attribute("value")

Solution 2

It would be like this

browser.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[@type='submit']/@value").text

Update:

With the function used by you, we can only extract the element not its attribute. To get its attribute, the expression should be something like this

browser.find_elements_by_xpath("//*[@type='submit']").get_attribute("value")

Ref: http://selenium-python.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api.html#selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement.find_elements_by_tag_name

Comments

[Andy Hayden]

perhaps this is a silly suggestion but does using raw strings fix: r"//*[@type='submit']/@value" ?

[avasal]

have you tried something like driver.find_element_by_xpath("//a[contains(text(),'Search')]‌​").click()

[RanRag]

When I tried your xpath with lxml it worked fine. I tried lxml.html.fromstring(s).xpath("//*[@type='submit']/@value") and the o/p is [' Search ']

[root]

@ hayde -- raw string doesnt't fix it.

[root]

@ RanRag -- yes, xpath seems to be correct, the problem seems to be with "find_elemnts", as object attribute is not an element. However there doesn't seem to be a method like get_attr_by_xpath or anything similar for browser object.

[root]

@ Kaipa -- your update is also the closest thing i found. However. There shoul be 'find_element' not elements or a for loop if using elements.

[Catbuilts]

@Jayy: yeah, It worked ! you're right. find_elements_by_xpath() function just tries to get an element, not an attribute. So, I got an errror when I want It returns an attribute. I just put get_attribute() following, then done. Thks !