How can I get the current contents of an element in webdriver

I believe prestomanifesto was on the right track. It depends on what kind of element it is. You would need to use element.get_attribute('value') for input elements and element.text to return the text node of an element.

You could check the WebElement object with element.tag_name to find out what kind of element it is and return the appropriate value.

This should help you figure out:

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('http://www.w3c.org')
element = driver.find_element_by_name('q')
element.send_keys('hi mom')

element_text = element.text
element_attribute_value = element.get_attribute('value')

print element
print 'element.text: {0}'.format(element_text)
print 'element.get_attribute(\'value\'): {0}'.format(element_attribute_value)
driver.quit()