[Answers](https://scrapfly.io/blog)   /  [css-selectors](https://scrapfly.io/blog/tag/css-selectors)   /  [How to find HTML elements by class?](https://scrapfly.io/blog/answers/how-to-find-html-elements-by-class)   # How to find HTML elements by class?

 by [Bernardas Alisauskas](https://scrapfly.io/blog/author/bernardas) Oct 24, 2022 1 min read [\#css-selectors](https://scrapfly.io/blog/tag/css-selectors) [\#data-parsing](https://scrapfly.io/blog/tag/data-parsing) [\#xpath](https://scrapfly.io/blog/tag/xpath) 

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When web scraping, the most common way to navigate HTML data is to find elements by class name. For that, we can use CSS or XPath Selectors:

### CSS selectors

- Use the `.class` notation, which will find any nodes that contain full class name: javascript```javascript
    `.some-class`
    will match:
    `<a class="some-class"></a>`
    `<a class="first some-class third"></a>`
    ```
- Use the `[class*="<partial>"]` notation which will find any nodes that contain a given string:javascript```javascript
    `[class*="some-class"]`
    will match:
    `<a class="some-class"></a>`
    `<a class="first some-class third"></a>`
    ```

### Xpath selectors

Alternatively, XPath selectors can be used with similar functions:

- `//*[@class="link"]` will find any element where the class *is exactly equal* to `"link"`
- `//*[contains(@class, "link")]` will find any element where class *contains* the string `"link"`



 

    Table of Contents- [CSS selectors](#css-selectors)
- [Xpath selectors](#xpath-selectors)
 
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  ## Related Questions

- [ Q How to find sibling HTML nodes using BeautifulSoup and Python? ](https://scrapfly.io/blog/answers/how-to-find-siblings-nodes-with-beautifulsoup)
- [ Q How to select elements by class using CSS selectors? ](https://scrapfly.io/blog/answers/how-to-select-elements-by-class-css-selectors)
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