clear() does not work reliably

[tpapaioa]

When using chrome browser in selenium, calls to TextInput.fill("") to clear a textarea element does not work. Looking at the browser console in the selenium container, I can see that after fill calls clear() on the textarea element, the element in the DOM still has the original user-entered text as its contents, even though the browser is displaying the placeholder text and el.get_attribute("value") returns an empty string.

Relevant code:

widgetastic/widget/input.py:

class TextInput(BaseInput):
[...]
    def fill(self, value):
[...]
        self.browser.click(self)
        self.browser.clear(self)
        self.browser.send_keys(value, self)
        return True

widgetastic/browser.py:

    def clear(self, locator: LocatorAlias, *args, **kwargs) -> None:
        """Clears a text input with iven locator."""
        self.logger.debug("clear: %r", locator)
        el = self.element(locator, *args, **kwargs)
        self.plugin.before_keyboard_input(el, None)
        result = el.clear()
        if el.get_attribute("value") and self.browser_type == "chrome":
            # Chrome is not able to clear input with element.clear() method, use javascript instead
            # We need to click on element
            el.click()
            self.execute_script("arguments[0].value = '';", el)
            # If clearing is not followed by send_keys, the previous text will appear again
            el.send_keys(Keys.SPACE, Keys.BACK_SPACE)
        self.plugin.after_keyboard_input(el, None)
        return result

From https://github.com/webdriverio/webdriverio/discussions/7650 it sounds like using the clear() WebDriver method does not work well when the element is controlled by React. Because el.get_attribute("value") returns an empty string, the workaround code in clear() for chrome doesn't run.

Instead of using clear(), it might be better (and closer to what a user would do) to use send_keys() to clear the text (e.g., with control-X or backspace * the length of the current value) instead of clear().