XPath, webdriver: How to get the element text? - selenium

Question

<div class="request-credentials-view drawer">
<div class="tip-inner" style="width: 686px;">
<div class="drawer-arrow" style="left: 926.55px;"></div>
<h3 class="heading">We've sent you an email </h3>
Need to fetch the text "We've sent you an email". When used the bellow in x-path checker:
//div[#class='request-credentials-view drawer']//h3[#class='heading']//*[text()="We've sent you an email"]
got "No match found". Also:
//div[#class='request-credentials-view drawer']//h3[(#class='heading')]//*[text()='<template>']
doesn't work in selenium web driver code.

Answer 1

Have you tried contains() function
//h3[contains(text(),"We've sent you an email")]
One thing I really like about contains is that you can do a partial match in text() specially excluding the white spaces

Answer 2

Alternatively, if you want to rely on the element's text, use normalize-space() to strip whitespaces around the text:
The normalize-space function strips leading and trailing white-space
from a string, replaces sequences of whitespace characters by a single
space, and returns the resulting string.
//h3[normalize-space(.) = "We've sent you an email"]
Or, you can locate the h3 element using a CSS selector checking class attribute values along the way to the desired element:
div.request-credentials-view h3.heading

Answer 3

Try this:
String message = driver.findElement(By.className("heading")).getText();
System.out.println(message);