Getting column values from a web table

[Sridhar Iyer]

Hello friends,

I want to retrieve the text of each cell in a column in a web table. I get the column index from a method and pass it as a parameter to this method:

01 public List<String> getColumnValues(int colIndex) {

02 WebElement colElement;

03 List<String> colValues = new ArrayList<String>();

04 List<WebElement> rows = getRows();

05 System.out.println("Rows count: " + rows.size());

06 Iterator<WebElement> i = rows.iterator();

07 while (i.hasNext()) {

08 WebElement row = i.next();

09 System.out.println("Row data: " + row.getText());

10 // How to avoid this check for the header row for each row

11 // iteration?

12 if (row.findElements(By.tagName("th")).size() > 0) {

13 colElement = row.findElement(By.xpath(".//th[" + colIndex + "]"));

14 } else {

15 colElement = row.findElement(By.xpath(".//td[" + colIndex + "]"));

16 }

17 colValues.add(colElement.getText().trim());

18 }

19 return colValues;

20 }

Here is my web table:

<table id = "webtable">

<thead>

<tr>

  <th>Header Column 1</th>

  <th>Header Column 2</th>

  <th>Header Column 3</th>

  <th>Header Column 4</th>

  <th>Header Column 5</th>

</tr>

</thead>

<tbody>

<tr> 

<td>Row 1 Col 1</td>

<td>Row 1 Col 2</td>

<td>Row 1 Col 3</td>

<td>Row 1 Col 4</td>

<td>Row 1 Col 5</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

<tbody>

<tr> 

<td>Row 2 Col 1</td>

<td>Row 2 Col 2</td>

<td>Row 2 Col 3</td>

<td>Row 2 Col 4</td>

<td>Row 2 Col 5</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

The issues:

1. On line 5, I get the proper count of the rows. But, on line 9, it is not picking up the row (cell) values. Its printing blanks. I was expecting Row 1 Col 1, Row 2 Col 2 etc.

2. On line 12, the number of elements with tag "th" returned is only 3, whereas there should be 5.

3. On line 15, I get a no such element exception trying to find .//td[3] even though I can fetch upto //td[5]

Can anybody please explain what I might be doing wrong or if there is a better way to get the column values returned as a List<String>. I need the collection with the column values so that I can use it in my Hamcrest Matcher assertion using the hasitem(item) to check whether my table contains a certain value.

[Sridhar Iyer]

Does anybody have any inputs?

[Gokul Krishna]

row.getText()  doesn't fetch you the cell value. you have to give the column number of the row for which value needs to retrieved.

you can get it by some thing like  row.findElement(By.tagName("td")).getText());

Cheers,

Gokul.

On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 5:39 PM, Sridhar Iyer <iyer....@gmail.com> wrote:

Does anybody have any inputs?

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[Robin Gupta]

You can give this a shot: List<WebElements> lst = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//tr/td"));
Followed by iterator on lst..

[Manish Bansal]

try this, it might help 

http://softtechlabs.com/2015/10/selentable-selenium-webtables-the-best-practice/

On Friday, 11 July 2014 23:51:00 UTC+5:30, Sridhar Iyer wrote:

[Shawn Knight]

why not make each row of the table a page-object? A class with predefined methods including one that conducts "matching" so you can search through a list of these page-objects and find the one you are looking for. I have a blog post and example project (in Java) around this concept.

http://simpleseleniumnotes.blogspot.com/2015/02/interaction-with-html-tables.html