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

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 开发者_如何学Gocharacter

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.

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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 @!

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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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.");