Selenium WebDriver for retrieving HTML input value

Question

Following code is the HTML of a page. 

<input type="text" name="prettyTime" id="prettyTime" class="ui-state-disabled prettyTime"  readonly="readonly">

The display on the page is simply a string displaying time.
In WebDriver, there is a WebElement object referring to <input> tag using

WebElement timeStamp = waitForElement(By.id("prettyTime"));

I want the value of the element (what ever is displayed on the page). I tried every WebElement getters and nothing is useful for retrieving the value that the user sees. Any help? Thanks.

Answer 1

Try 

element.getAttribute("value")

The text property is for text within the tags of an element. For input elements, the displayed text is not wrapped by the <input> tag, instead it's inside the value attribute.