Get to know one of the differences between the commands cy.get and cy.contains

Here's a simple but helpful piece of information to better use Cypress and understand when to use one command or another.

Do you know the difference between the two lines of code below?

cy.get('tr:contains(User 1)')

cy.contains('tr', 'User 1')

They look quite similar, don't they?

However, they are actually different.

While cy.get gets one or more DOM elements.

cy.contains gets only one DOM element.

Here's an example where we need to combine cy.get with jQuery's contains selector instead of using cy.contains.

Just to reinforce.

cy.get('tr:contains(User 1)') // get ALL table rows which contain User 1 in their content

cy.contains('tr', 'User 1') // get the first table row which contains User 1 in its content

I hope you find this helpful information.

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👋 Until next time, and happy testing!

This content was translated to Portuguese and can be found on the Talking About Testing blog.