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

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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.

3 Answers

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())

You can use the querySelector function, and then call the innerHTML function:

handle = page.querySelector(".user-agent")
print(handle.innerHTML())

according to Latest official python version Playwright, you should use:

-> the code:

# userAgentSelector = ".user-agent"
userAgentSelector = "div.user-agent"
elementHandle = page.query_selector(userAgentSelector)
uaHtml = elementHandle.inner_html()
print("uaHtml=%s" % uaHtml)
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