[🐛 Bug]: XPATH div[10+] cannot retrieve text.

What happened?

When retrieving absolute and relative XPATH nodes, a div greater than 9 will return an empty text value.

How can we reproduce the issue?

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

options = Options()
options.headless = True
options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1200")

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()))
driver.get("https://www.cntower.ca/lighting-schedule/")
colour9 = driver.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value='//*[@id="block-de-theme-content"]/div/article/div/div/div/div[1]/div/div/div/div/div/div[9]/article/div[1]/div[2]')
colour10 = driver.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value='//*[@id="block-de-theme-content"]/div/article/div/div/div/div[1]/div/div/div/div/div/div[10]/article/div[1]/div[2]')

print(colour9.text) #returns a string
print(colour10.text) #returns an empty string
driver.quit()

Relevant log output

N/A

Operating System

Ubuntu / Multiple

Selenium version

Python 3.9.6

What are the browser(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

Chromium 93.0.4577.82

What are the browser driver(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

ChromeDriver 93.0.4577.82

Are you using Selenium Grid?

No

[titusfortner]

I think there’s just something in your absolute XPath tripping you up.

Loop over this (or tweak for whatever you’re actually trying to capture):

driver.find_elements(by=By.CSS, value='div.row article h2')

Feel free to reach us at https://www.selenium.dev/support/#ChatRoom

[symonk]

@tallmega it looks to me like the tiles are not properly rendered / visible here until scrolling occurs on that particular URL so I’m not sure it’s a particular xpath & div index of >9, the elements are found but their visible text is likely empty? https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/#get-element-text. Whether thats:

• A problem on this specific site
• Working as intended inline with the spec
• A straight up bug

I am not so sure 😉, need to do a bit of digging.

For example if you scroll to the bottom of the page, then query all the texts, likely prints out correctly.

---

Naive example to prove out the theory:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager


with webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install())) as driver:
    driver.get("https://www.cntower.ca/lighting-schedule/")
    elements = driver.find_elements("xpath", "//span[@class='field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden']")
    for element in elements:
        driver.execute_script("arguments[0].scrollIntoView();", element)
        print(element.text)