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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T12:57:58+00:00

Given the following HTML page: <html> <head> <title>WatiN Test</title> </head> <body> <div> <p>Hello World!</p>

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Given the following HTML page:

<html>
<head>
    <title>WatiN Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>
    <p>Hello World!</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

I would like to be able to search for some text (lets say "World"), and get a reference to its parent element (in this case the <p> element).

If I try this:

var element = ie.Element(Find.ByText(t => t.Contains("World")))

or this:

var element = ie.Element(e => e.Text != null && e.Text.Contains("World"));

I get back the <html> element. This is consistent with the WatiN documentation for Element.Text which states: “Gets the innertext of this element (and the innertext of all the elements contained in this element)”.

Since all text within the page is contained within the <html> element, I’ll always get this back instead of the immediate parent.

Is there a way to get just the text immediately beneath an element (not the text within the elements contained by it)?

Is there another way of doing this?

Many thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Bellow code will find first element inside the <body/> with text containing “World”. Elements which are classified as element containers and has child elements will be omitted.

    var element = ie.ElementOfType<Body>(Find.First()).Element(e =>
{
    if (e.Text != null && e.Text.Contains("World"))
    {
        var container = e as IElementContainer;
        if (container == null || container.Elements.Count == 0)
            return true;
    }
    return false;
});

    Note: You may wonder why I wrote ie.ElementOfType<Body>(Find.First()).Element instead of just ie.Element. This should work, but it doesn’t. I think it’s a bug. I wrote a post about it on WatiN mailing list and will update this answer when I receive the answer.

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