How to get length of text box from webpage in python

Question

How can I get text from text box, search box from webpage. I am trying to get text and and get length to check if it's empty. eg

 driver = webdriver.Chrome()
 driver.get('http://www.yahoo.com')

I tried driver.find_element_by_name('p').text But it prints out null even though text is there.

Answer 1

For input web element use el.get_attribute('value') :

In [14]: driver = webdriver.Chrome()

In [15]: driver.get('http://www.yahoo.com')

In [16]: search = driver.find_element_by_css_selector('input[title=Search]')

In [17]: search.get_attribute('value')
Out[17]: u''

In [18]: search.send_keys('SO the best!')

In [19]: search.get_attribute('value')
Out[19]: u'SO the best!'