How to get immediate text with webdriverIO - css-selectors

Question

I have html DOM like this:
<div class="alert alert-danger">
<button class="close" aria-hidden="true" data-dismiss="alert" type="button">×</button>
Your username or password was incorrect.
</div>
I would like to get Your username or password was incorrect. text.
If I do:
$('.global-alerts div.alert-danger').getText()
Then I get this ×.
Is there a way to get the only text part inside that div element?
I managed to do something like this:
getErrorMessageText() {
return browser.execute(function () {
const selector = '.global-alerts div.alert-danger';
// #ts-ignore
return $(selector).contents().not($(selector).children()).text().trim();
});
}
And it works.
But does anybody have better idea? Or more of like webdriverIO approach here?

Answer 1

Does it work if you use something like this?
var innerHTML = $('.global-alerts div.alert-danger').getHTML(false);
the false argument tells indicates whether or not to include the selector element tag in the output.

Answer 2

Serious solution
I do not quite see any other way but to use execute in order to "grab" that information from the page.
I would however place it in a browser command (either do it in the config "before" hook, or add a service that adds the command in the before hook)
This is what I ended up with considering typescript as main language, ignoring the use of jQuery, and considering that you use the before hook:
/**
* Gets executed before test execution begins. At this point you can access to all global
* variables like `browser`. It is the perfect place to define custom commands.
* #param {Array.<Object>} capabilities list of capabilities details
* #param {Array.<String>} specs List of spec file paths that are to be run
* #param {Object} browser instance of created browser/device session
*/
before: function (_capabilities: any, _specs: any, browser: WebdriverIO.Browser) {
browser.addCommand(
'getNodeText',
async function() {
return this.execute(
(selector: string) =>
Array.from( document.querySelector(selector).childNodes || [])
.filter((n: HTMLElement) => n.nodeType === n.TEXT_NODE)
.map(n => n.textContent)
.reduce(function(f, c) {return f+c;}, '')
.replace('\n', '')
.trim(),
this.selector
);
},
true
);
},
With this approach, typescript might complain about the function that passed to webdriver to get executed, so you can either write it properly, or just move it to a .js file and be done with it.
Just watch for document.querySelector(selector), in theory, it should not be null since the command is executed on an already found by webdriver element.
The way you grab the text there is just await (await $('.alert.alert-danger').getNodeText());
This should return the full string from within the node itself, but not any subchild.
Note: If you end up with an element like: <div id="mytxt">my text style is <strong>strong</strong> and <italic> italic </italic>. - html fan</div> and you do this getNodeText(), you probably end up with the value my text style is and . - html fan.
The "don't get bothered to much" solution
This approach will also sort of check that the "x" button is still there.
await expect($('.global-alerts div.alert-danger')).toHaveText('xYour username or password was incorrect.')

Answer 3

in latest version of WebDriverIO (v8), you can use this selector: aria/YourContent. For example:
With the DOM like this:
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
You can use this selector
console.log(await $('aria/Hello World!').getText()) // outputs: "Hello World!"
Ref: https://webdriver.io/docs/selectors/#fetch-by-content