How do I get the HTML in an element using Capybara? - cucumber

Question

I’m writing a cucumber test where I want to get the HTML in an element.
For example:
within 'table' do
# this works
find('//tr[2]//td[7]').text.should == "these are the comments"
# I want something like this (there is no "html" method)
find('//tr[2]//td[7]').html.should == "these are the <b>comments</b>"
end
Anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

You can call HTML DOM innerHTML Property:
find('//tr[2]//td[7]')['innerHTML']
Should work for any browser or driver.
You can check all available properties on w3schools

Answer 2

This post is old, but I think I found a way if you still need this.
To access the Nokogiri node from the Capybara element (using Capybara 1.0.0beta1, Nokogiri 1.4.4) try this:
elem = find('//tr[2]//td[10]')
node = elem.native
#This will give you a Nokogiri XML element
node.children[1].attributes["href"].value.should == "these are the <b>comments</b>"
The last part may vary for you, but you should be able to find the HTML somewhere in that node variable

Answer 3

In my environment, find returns a Capybara::Element - that responds to the :native method as Eric Hu mentioned above, which returns a Selenium::WebDriver::Element (for me). Then :text gets the contents, so it could be as simple as:
results = find(:xpath, "//td[#id='#{cell_id}']")
contents = results.native.text
if you're looking for the contents of a table cell. There's no content, inner_html, inner_text, or node methods on a Capybara::Element. Assuming people aren't just making things up, perhaps you get something different back from find depending on what else you have loaded with Capybara.

Answer 4

Looks like you can do (node).native.inner_html to get the HTML content, for example with HTML like this:
<div><strong>Some</strong> HTML</div>
You could do the following:
find('div').native.inner_html
=> '<strong>Some</strong> HTML'

Answer 5

I ran into the same issue as Cyril Duchon-Doris, and per https://github.com/teampoltergeist/poltergeist/issues/629 the way to access the HTML of an Capybara::Poltergeist::Node is via the outerHTML property, e.g.:
find('//tr[2]//td[7]')['outerHTML']

Answer 6

Most of the other answers work only in Racktest (as they use Racktest-specific features).
If your driver supports javascript evaluation (like Selenium) you can use innerHTML :
html = page.evaluate_script("document.getElementById('my_id').innerHTML")

Answer 7

If you're using the Poltergeist driver, these methods will allow you to inspect what matches:
http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/poltergeist/1.5.1/Capybara/Poltergeist/Node
For example:
page.find('[name="form-field"]').native.value == 'something'

Answer 8

try calling find('//tr[2]//td[10]').node on it to get at the actual nokogiri object

Answer 9

Well, Capybara uses Nokogiri to parse, so this page might be appropriate:
http://nokogiri.org/Nokogiri/XML/Node.html
I believe content is the method you are looking for.

Answer 10

You could also switch to capybara-ui and do the following:
# define your widget, in this case in your role
class User < Capybara::UI::Role
widget :seventh_cell, [:xpath, '//tr[2]//td[7]']
end
# then in your tests
role = User.new
expect(role.widget(:seventh_cell).html).to eq(<h1>My html</h1>)