Ultimate CSS Selector Cheatsheet for HTML Parsing
Ultimate companion for HTML parsing using CSS selectors. This cheatsheet contains all syntax explanations with interactive examples.
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:
.class
notation, which will find any nodes that contain full class name:`.some-class`
will match:
`<a class="some-class"></a>`
`<a class="first some-class third"></a>`
[class*="<partial>"]
notation which will find any nodes that contain a given string:`[class*="some-class"]`
will match:
`<a class="some-class"></a>`
`<a class="first some-class third"></a>`
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"