capybara how to find to get the result in html or multiline text?

Question

There's a html code

<p>
test text
<br/>
test2
<p/>

When performing the method:

.find(:xpath, "/html/p").text

result:

test text test2

How can I get the "two lines"

test text
test2

Answer 1

Capybara tries to follow the webdriver spec when it makes sense, which means #text returns normalized text content with carriage returns/linefeeds removed and therefore doesn't fulfill your needs.

Unfortunately capybara-webkit doesn't return element properties when accessed through #[] so this won't work with capybara-webkit - it should work with selenium or poltergeist though

However, since you're using one of the real browser drivers (not rack-test) you should be able to access the elements innerText property by doing

find(:xpath, "/html/p")['innerText']

which should provide the output you're looking for