[Question]

Hey, I am migrating tests from Cypress to Playwright and we had a couple of tests that were testing some elements on the SSR. Is it possible to achieve an equivalent behavior to the Cypress one from this article?

With Cypress, we were able to use selectors on the $html from the response, I’m not sure if that’s doable with Playwright. I tried both:

• const response = await page.goto() / const response = await request.get()

Then to apply the response.text() I can see the server-side HTML as a string but I cannot use any selectors on it. I would appreciate any advice on how to test SSR HTML, thank you.

[ambiguous48]

I guess that would depend what you are testing for. If your aim is to test the user experience on different browsers/devices/screen sizes/etc, then you’re better off using the various web api’s exposed by playwright.

Based on the simple example you’ve given, if you change the html tag from nav to header (or div to span, etc) for whatever reason, your test will fail even though nothing would change from the end user’s perspective. If you use playwright’s locators however, your tests will continue to pass regardless of the implementation details.

[dgozman]

Closing as per above. Thanks @ambiguous48 for the great explanation!