Need to get a value of an attribute using selenium

I was in this situation when i needed to get the value of an html attribute and i found the selenium.getattribute very handy .....

Okay the scenario was such that there was an element which is collapsible on the page and the only attibute for that element that indictated the status of the collapsible element was the 'Class'. when the element was collapsed, the value of the class attribute was 'asleep' and when the element was expanded, the value of the class atttribute was 'awake'.

The script used to determine the status of this element is

selenium.GetAttribute("elementLocator@nameofAttribute");

so if the id of my element is FundingClass and the attribute we are interested in is the 'Class'

The selenium code will be
selenium.GetAttribute("FundingClass@Class");

Hope this helps someone .....

Internet Explorer doesnt handle xpath to locate images exceptionally well

So i have been doing a lot of selenium and the website i am trying to automate test for
doesnt have a lot of element with id, name, or any other HTML attributes that makes selenium testing a bit easier.

So i have been using of xpath, my intent was to click on an image and i have used the src attribute of the image element.

so my original command,

selenium.click ("xpath=//img[@src="location/of/image/on/disc"]");

This works excellently on firefox but on IE, i keep getting the error "Element not found!"

so after several tries, this definitely work on both IE and firefox ......

selenium.click ("xpath=//img[@contains(@href, "google.com")]");
The second parameter of the xpath "contains" a segment of the link that the image element points to.Note that the img element has a href and that is why i am able to use the "contains" method of the xpath to locate the img.