Selenium WebDriver with Perl - perl

Question

I am trying to run the Selenium driver with Perl bindings, and due to the lack of examples and documentation, I am running into some roadblocks. I have figured out how to do some basic things, but I seem to be running into some issues with other simple things like validating the text on a page using Remote::Driver package.
If I try to do something like this:
$sel->get("https://www.yahoo.com/" );
$ret = $sel->find_element("//div[contains( text(),'Thursday, April 26, 2012')]");
I get a message back that the element couldn't be found. I am using xpath because the driver package doesn't appear to have a sub specific for finding text.. at least not that I've found.
If my xpath setup is wrong or if someone knows a better way, that would be extremely helpful. I'm having problems with some button clicking too.. but this seems like it should be easier and is bugging me.

Answer 1

Finding text on a web page and comparing that text to some "known good value" using Selenium::Remote::Driver can be implemented as follows:
File: SomeWebApp.pm
package SomeWebApp;
sub get_text_present {
my $self = shift;
my $target = shift;
my $locator = shift;
my $text = $self->{driver}->find_element($target, $locator)->get_text();
return $text;
}
Somewhere in your test script: test.pl
my $text = $some_web_app->get_text_present("MainContent_RequiredFieldValidator6", "id");
The above finds the element identified by $target using the locating scheme identified by $locator and stores it in the variable $text. You can then use that to compare / validate as required / needed.

Answer 2

https is a tad slower loading than http. Although WebDriver is pretty good about waiting until it's figured out that the requested page is fully loaded, maybe you need to give it a little help here. Add a sleep(2); after the get() call and see if it works. If it does, try cutting down to 1 second. You can also do a get_title call to see if you've loaded the page you think you have.
The other possibility is that your text target isn't quite exactly the same as what's on the page. You could try looking first for one word, such as "April", and see if you get a hit, and then expand until you find the mismatch (e.g., does this string actually have a newline or break within it? How about an HTML entity such as a non-breaking space?). Also, you are looking for that bit of text anywhere under a div (all child text supposedly is concatenated, and then the search done). That would more likely cast too wide a net than not get anything at all, but it's worth knowing.