Selenium: How to enter white space as the value of a text field? - selenium

Question

I have a form text field that is being populated with a default value. I would like to clear the value and enter white space to assert that the expected validation occurs. I am using Selenium RC and the PHPUnit Selenium extension. How can I achieve this?
Note: I have already tried doing these, but they do not work:
$this->type('FirstName', " "); //spaces
$this->type('FirstName', "\t"); //tab character
They clear the value from the field, but they do not enter the white space into the field.
Update: I found that if you are using Selenium IDE, you can type white space by using their ${space} variable but this does not work when using Selenium RC and the PHPUnit Selenium extension.

Answer 1

recently I am having the same problem just like Andrew where the ${space} isn't work in Selenium RC. I found out that Zugwalt's solution is useful. Here is what I did to capture the whitespace.
selenium.focus("txt_textbox1");
selenium.keyPressNative("32");
strOutput = selenium.getEval("this.browserbot.findElement('txt_textbox1').value = ' ';");
Hope this help ;)
THanks #!

Answer 2

I fixed this in the phpunit-selenium code on github and made a pull request to the maintainer.
Here is my gist if anyone cares:
https://github.com/undernewmanagement/phpunit-selenium/commit/1b783ba8cfe4736f525b316a75a991e0a701afd1

Answer 3

You could use javascript injection and manipulate the value directly
selenium.getEval("this.browserbot.findElement('FirstName').value = ' ';");
Note this will not fire off any events so you would have to manually trigger them if desired.

Answer 4

How about setting it's value to an empty string ('')?

Answer 5

How about using the keyPress() function to "press" the spacebar?

Answer 6

You can try selenium.typeKeys('FirstName'," ");
Please let me know if it worked.

Answer 7

This should work for phpunit with Selenium:
class MyTest extends PHPUnit_Extensions_Selenium2TestCase
{
public function testSomething()
{
$textField = $this->byCssSelector('.blah');
// ...
$textField->clear();
$textField->value(" ");
// test assertion to follow
}
}
If you want to enter a sentence, the following won't work:
$textField->value("this is a sentence.");
The following will:
$textField->value("this");
$textField->value(" ");
$textField->value("is");
$textField->value(" ");
$textField->value("a");
$textField->value(" ");
$textField->value("sentence.");