How to get text from textnodes seperated by whitespace using Selenium and Python

Question

I am on this page:

https://fantasy.premierleague.com/statistics

When you click on any "i" icon next to a player, a popup window appears. Then, i want to get the surname of the player. This is how "inspect element" looks like ("whitespace" actually appears within a box):

<h2 class="ElementDialog__ElementHeading-gmefnd-2 ijAScJ">
 Kevin
 whitespace
 De Bruyne

What i want to do is to take the text that appears after the whitespace. I can get the full text (ie both name and surname) using this:

player_full_name = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@class="ElementDialog__ElementHeading-gmefnd-2 ijAScJ"]').text

but how can i get the surname only (ie what appears after the whitespace)? Note that for other players it could have been like this:

<h2 class="ElementDialog__ElementHeading-gmefnd-2 ijAScJ">
 Gabriel Fernando
 whitespace
 de Jesus

or like this:

<h2 class="ElementDialog__ElementHeading-gmefnd-2 ijAScJ">
 Dean
 whitespace
 Henderson

ie splitting the text and taking the last one or two elements will not work.

Answer 1

The surname of the player is the second or last text node within it's parent WebElement . So extract the surname eg De Bruyne from Kevin De Bruyne you can use either of the following Locator Strategies :

• Using CSS_SELECTOR , childNodes and strip() :

   driver.get("https://fantasy.premierleague.com/statistics") WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//table//tbody/tr/td/button"))).click() print( driver.execute_script('return arguments[0].lastChild.textContent;', WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "h2.ElementDialog__ElementHeading-gmefnd-2")))).strip())

• Console Output:

   De Bruyne

• Using CSS_SELECTOR , childNodes and splitlines() :

   driver.get("https://fantasy.premierleague.com/statistics") WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//table//tbody/tr/td/button"))).click() print( driver.execute_script('return arguments[0].lastChild.textContent;', WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "h2.ElementDialog__ElementHeading-gmefnd-2")))).splitlines())

• Console Output:

   ['De Bruyne']

• Note : You have to add the following imports:

   from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

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References

You can find a couple of relevant detailed discussions in:

• How to retrieve partial text from a text node using Selenium and Python