Interacting with ace editor using selenium programmatically

Question

I'm trying to do some web scraping with `selenium-webdriver`. The particular page uses the ace editor for syntax highlighting. The problem is that I can enter text using ``` driver.get "http://codetable.org" elem = driver.find_element(:css, "#editor textarea") elem.send_keys "Hello" ``` but I can't clear the text that is once entered. `elem.clear` has no impact on the page. Is there some way I can delete the text that is on the screen programmatically? I suspect this is because of the extra css that ace adds. I'm using `ruby 1.9.3`. I've also tried this ``` irb(main):035:0> driver.find_element(:css, ".ace_content").clear Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnknownError: Element must be user-editable in order to clear it. from [remote server] ```

Accepted Answer

It looks like when a value is inputted into the textarea, it is applied to another span. The textarea always has a blank value, which explains why `clear` does not work appear to do anything.

If you want to clear the text, I think you might have to use keyboard shortcuts - ctrl+a and then delete. Try:

```
elem.send_keys [:control, 'a'], :delete
```

Interacting with ace editor using selenium programmatically

Solution

Problem