Getting text from a node

You can't do this in the WebDriver API, you have to do it in your code. For example:

var textOfA = theAElement.getText();
var textOfSpan = theSpanElement.getText();
var text = textOfA.substr(0, textOfA.length - textOfSpan.length).trim('\n');

Note that the trailing newline is actually part of the text of the <a> element, so if you don't want it, you need to strip it.