Using Playwright for Python, how do I select (or find) an element?

Question

I'm trying to learn the Python version of Playwright. See here

I would like to learn how to locate an element, so that I can do things with it. Like printing the inner HTML, clicking on it and such.

The example below loads a page and prints the HTML

from playwright import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=False)
    page = browser.newPage()
    page.goto('http://whatsmyuseragent.org/')
    print(page.innerHTML("*"))
    browser.close()

This page contains an element

<div class="user-agent">
    <p class="intro-text">Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4238.0 Safari/537.36</p>
</div>

Using Selenium, I could locate the element and print it's content like this

elem = driver.find_element_by_class_name("user-agent")
print(elem)
print(elem.get_attribute("innerHTML"))

How can I do the same in Playwright?

#UPDATE# - Note if you want to run this in 2021+ that current versions of playwright have changed the syntax from CamelCase to snake_case.

Answer 1

I'm trying to learn the Python version of Playwright. See here

I would like to learn how to locate an element, so that I can do things with it. Like printing the inner HTML, clicking on it and such.

The example below loads a page and prints the HTML

from playwright import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=False)
    page = browser.newPage()
    page.goto('http://whatsmyuseragent.org/')
    print(page.innerHTML("*"))
    browser.close()

This page contains an element

<div class="user-agent">
    <p class="intro-text">Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4238.0 Safari/537.36</p>
</div>

Using Selenium, I could locate the element and print it's content like this

elem = driver.find_element_by_class_name("user-agent")
print(elem)
print(elem.get_attribute("innerHTML"))

How can I do the same in Playwright?

Answer 2

The accepted answer does not work with the newer versions of Playwright. (Thanks @576i for pointing this out)

Here is the Python code that works with the newer versions (tested with version 1.5):

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.goto('http://whatsmyuseragent.org/')
    ua = page.query_selector(".user-agent");
    print(ua.inner_html())
    browser.close()

To get only the text, use the inner_text() function.

print(ua.inner_text())

Answer 3

I'm trying to learn the Python version of Playwright. See here

I would like to learn how to locate an element, so that I can do things with it. Like printing the inner HTML, clicking on it and such.

The example below loads a page and prints the HTML

from playwright import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=False)
    page = browser.newPage()
    page.goto('http://whatsmyuseragent.org/')
    print(page.innerHTML("*"))
    browser.close()

This page contains an element

<div class="user-agent">
    <p class="intro-text">Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4238.0 Safari/537.36</p>
</div>

Using Selenium, I could locate the element and print it's content like this

elem = driver.find_element_by_class_name("user-agent")
print(elem)
print(elem.get_attribute("innerHTML"))

How can I do the same in Playwright?

Answer 4

I think you can find the solutions in the following article. Playwright >> Find, Locate, Select Elements/Tags using Playwright

• Playwright find all elements/tags containing specified text
• Playwright find elements/tags containing specified child element/tag
• Playwright loop through all elements/tags in locator() result
• Playwright find/get first element Playwright find/get last element
• Playwright get the parent element Playwright get the child element
• Playwright get nth child element Playwright find elements/tags by css
• class Playwright find elements near the specified text Playwright
• find elements/tags by attribute Playwright find elements/tags by id