What is the Difference Between textContents, innerText, and innerHtml?

textContents is all text contained by an element and all its children that are for formatting purposes only.
innerText returns all text contained by an element and all its child elements.
innerHtml returns all text, including html tags, that is contained by an element.

Consider the following html code.

<div id="mylinks">
  This is my <b>link collection</b>:
  <ul>
    <li><a href="www.borland.com">Bye bye <b>Borland</b> </a></li>
    <li><a href="www.microfocus.com">Welcome to <b>Micro Focus</b></a></li>
  </ul>
</div>

The following table details the different properties that return.

Code	Returned Value
`browser.DomElement("//div[@id='mylinks']").GetProperty("textContents")`	This is my link collection:
`browser.DomElement("//div[@id='mylinks']").GetProperty("innerText")`	This is my link collection:Bye bye Borland Welcome to Micro Focus
`browser.DomElement("//div[@id='mylinks']").GetProperty("innerHtml")`	This is my <b>link collection</b>: <ul> <li><a href="www.borland.com">Bye bye <b>Borland</b></a></li> <li><a href="www.microfocus.com">Welcome to <b>Micro Focus</b></a></li> </ul>

Code

Returned Value

browser.DomElement("//div[@id='mylinks']").GetProperty("textContents")

This is my link collection:

browser.DomElement("//div[@id='mylinks']").GetProperty("innerText")

This is my link collection:Bye bye Borland Welcome to Micro Focus

browser.DomElement("//div[@id='mylinks']").GetProperty("innerHtml")

This is my <b>link collection</b>:
<ul> 
  <li><a href="www.borland.com">Bye bye <b>Borland</b></a></li>
  <li><a href="www.microfocus.com">Welcome to <b>Micro Focus</b></a></li> 
</ul>

Note: In Silk Test 13.5 or later, whitespace in texts, which are retrieved through the textContents property of an element, is trimmed consistently across all supported browsers. For some browser versions, this whitespace handling differs to Silk Test versions prior to Silk Test 13.5. You can re-enable the old behavior by setting the OPT_COMPATIBILITY option to a version lower than 13.5.0. For example, to set the option to Silk Test 13.0, type the following into your script:

'VB .NET code
Agent.SetOption("OPT_COMPATIBILITY", "13.0.0")

// C# code
Agent.SetOption("OPT_COMPATIBILITY", "13.0.0");