What is a CSS selector?

A CSS selector is a pattern used to select and target HTML elements on a web page. Originally designed for styling with CSS, selectors have become essential for web scraping because they provide a precise way to locate specific elements in HTML documents.

Common selector types:

• Element names: div, span, p
• Classes: .classname
• IDs: #id
• Attribute selectors: [href], [data-id="123"]

For web scraping:

CSS selectors are used with libraries like Cheerio (Node.js), BeautifulSoup (Python), or GoQuery (Go) to extract data from specific parts of a page. They are generally faster and more readable than XPath, making them the preferred choice for most scraping tasks.

When building scrapers, CSS selectors let you precisely target elements containing the data you need, such as product prices, article titles, or user comments, without parsing the entire HTML structure manually.