Should I use CSS selectors or XPath for web scraping?

CSS selectors are generally the better choice for web scraping compared to XPath.

Advantages of CSS selectors:

  • Faster to execute in most scraping libraries
  • Easier to read and maintain
  • Better support across scraping libraries
  • More familiar syntax for web developers
  • Excel at selecting elements by class, ID, or attributes (90% of scraping use cases)

When XPath is better:

  • Traversing up the DOM tree (selecting parent elements)
  • Complex text matching within elements
  • Navigating between sibling elements based on their content
  • Selecting elements based on their position relative to text content

Recommendation:

For most web scraping projects, start with CSS selectors as your default choice. They're simpler, faster, and handle the majority of selection needs. Only switch to XPath when you encounter specific scenarios that CSS cannot handle efficiently, such as parent navigation or text-based selection.

Many experienced scrapers use CSS selectors for 95% of their work and only reach for XPath in edge cases.

Try our CSS Selector Picker →

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